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This article takes the Oder region as an example to demonstrate the way in which memories of the Second World War and the postwar years are cultivated by residents of the region, and furthermore, how the place of remembrance of the Oder–Neisse line was encoded by Germans and Poles respectively. The Oder region saw an almost complete population exchange, which was a result of several migration processes. On both sides of the Oder–Neisse line, the memories of these events were manipulated politically and influenced the collective memory of the respective groups. The following text is based on the results of an Oral History project (www.pyrzany-kozaki.eu) carried out under my direction in 2011, as well as on the analysis of memoirs written by Polish new settlers in the 1950s and on reports by German refugees and expellees. These sources were the main focus of my research on the topic of ‘“Poland's Wild West” – forced migration and cultural appropriation of the Oder region 1945–1948’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the following questions: how and with the aid of which resources was the memory of forced labour during World War II constructed and recreated in the public space of Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine? How has the perception of the place of forced labourers in the general pantheon of war participants changed? And what kinds of transformations took place in the meaningful emphases and symbolic accretion of images associated with this group of people? The initial focus is on the Soviet version of this memory because some correction must be made to the theory that was formulated in the early 1990s and which gradually acquired normative significance in post-Soviet (including Ukrainian) journalism and scholarly literature: namely, that the history, creativity, and memory of this population group were "forgotten" in the official Soviet version of the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The annihilation of the European Jews, the Holocaust, had in ensuing decades occupied a different place in the collective memory of Scandinavian countries than in other parts of former Nazi dominated Europe. This was due to most Scandinavian Jews, and especially Danish Jews, being rescued from deportation and extermination in the Nazi extermination camps. This made the rescue of the Jews central to the collective memory of the German occupation, and it might explain why the Holocaust was long concealed behind this ‘master narrative’. In more recent years, historical research has advanced a more nuanced view of the Danish rescue in October 1943. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]