The museum will focus on the history of Poland's Jewish community, which dates back to the 10th Century, as well as the story of the Nazi occupation and the Holocaust.
For much of their country's turbulent history, many of Poland's most beloved artists have worked in exile.
"Polish opera has an emotional intensity, a resonance", said Mr Pountney, who pointed to the difficult history that Poland had endured under long periods of foreign domination.
The charity claims Shaikh has always maintained he went to China to start a career as a pop star, despite no history of public singing, having previously lived in Poland where he tried to set up an airline.
Or consider the recent history of Belovezhskaya Pushcha, a forest park straddling Belarus and Poland.
Poland's own account of its history may never quite chime with its neighbours'.
Mr Rakowski was usually seen as an arch-trimmer, a prime example of the collaboration forced on Poland by its history.
"The PRL's end is an easy target of parody, and we mainly talk about it with a wink of the eye, " says Mr. Gorski, who has also studied more serious history, such as Stalin's brutal imposition of communism on Poland.
WSJ: Poles Apart: Today's Kids Line Up to Learn About Communist Past in Poland
The Warsaw uprising of 1944, one of the greatest catastrophes in Polish history, gets a much better press than Poland's role in destroying the evil empire.
Such hopeful features have helped promote fresh interest among young Polish Jews and quite a few Gentiles in Poland's Jewish history since the communist era, when many Poles of Jewish background thought it wise to blur their ancestry.
True enough though the chances of a Communist president would be hugely enhanced if the party changed its name (as its cousins in Central Europe have done), disavowed much of its history, embraced a bit of free-marketry, and had the nous to put a youthful person like Poland's president, Alexander Kwasniewski, at its head.
The difficulties of writing this type of history are extreme when a single volume of just over 300 text pages has to cover a diverse continent from Ireland to Poland, from Bergen to Palermo, over a period when it was changing so fast.
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