In the transformative decade marked by the rise of Solidarity (1980–1989), the cross came to serve as a source of metaphysical legitimation for the growing opposition movement. Used to imply the “sacred” nature of anti-Communist mobilization, the symbol of the cross became not only a default signal of anti-Communist politics, but also an extremely popular motif that came to dominate both Solidarity’s visual culture and Poland’s memorial landscape. Solidarity used the symbol to mark spaces of anti-Communist dissent, mourn workers killed in standoffs with the police, and foster a rift in the popular mind between “the nation” and the Communist rulers, portrayed as “anti-nation.” Three case studies illuminate how the symbol was instrumental in both solidifying and challenging this boundary. Communist attempts to hijack celebrations held at the foot of the Poznań Crosses in commemoration of the workers’ rebellion of 1956, Solidarity’s campaign to rebrand May Day using Catholic symbols, and the project to display the symbol of the cross during the fortieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising throw into relief the contradictory nature of the symbol in the late socialist period

But where did the story of Jewish deportees fit into all this? Isaac Schneersohn, a Russian immigrant who had survived the war in hiding, emerged at the Liberation to found the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine, which undertook to write the history of the genocide of the Jews. Schneersohn was also the moving force behind construction of a monument completed in 1956, the Mémorial du Martyr juif inconnu, now known as the Mémorial de la Shoah. The object of all such efforts was at to evoke the specificity of Jewish suffering and to find a way to include Jews qua Jews in memorial events connected to the Deportation. Schneersohn had more success at this than is often appreciated.