World War II's latest 'victims'

"When I hear that they want to build a European center, then I would suspect that it would be created as the result of a European dialogue," says Tomas Kafka, who heads the German-Czech Future Fund, an organization focused on German-Czech relations. "Nobody resents the German side for wanting to deal with their own history, but they should do it tactfully and with measure."

The League has long wanted the Polish and Czech governments to acknowledge crimes and human rights violations committed against the expellees. Chief among these are the decrees by former Czechoslovak President Edvard Benes in 1945 that stripped the country's German minority of property and citizenship. The decrees remain in effect today, with both the German and Czech governments reluctant to open the Pandora's box of claims and counterclaims that would ensue if they were repealed.

Shocked by the vitriol against the memorial, the League has begun a public relations campaign in Poland, the Czech Republic and Germany, advertising the Center for Expulsion as a place to begin dialogue about the past and bring attention to expulsions as an ongoing human rights issue.

The center would include a library, documentation center, and a museum. While the German government has not granted any site yet, the proposal has won support from about 400 German municipalities who are donating an average of about 10 cents per resident toward the $2.3 million budget.

The center will be "much more concentrated on the people that are being expelled or will be expelled in the future than it is on our history," says Peter Glotz, the League's co-director, who was five years old when he and his mother were forced to flee from what is today the Czech Republic. "That, of course, plays a role, but expulsion is a current political problem, not a historical one."

The Polish and Czech heads of government have endorsed a center that would examine expulsions in a larger context. But Poland has warned against drawing any moral equivalency between the sufferings of Germans and Poles.

To Vetter, a memorial would be a crucial testament to his harrowing experience. Though he grew up near Hanover, and spent 30 years of his life in Berlin, he has never shaken a feeling of displacement. Vetter's family was among the many Germans subjected to beatings, rape, and other humiliations by the Red Army advancing from the East. In their new home in the West, they met indifference and scorn from their countrymen.

Vetter returns two or three times a year to the town of his birth, Parchwitz, since renamed Prochowize. The area's coat of arms hangs in his office, near a map on which he retraces the route he marched along with other refugees.

"I can't be made responsible for what Hitler did," he says. "We need to be able to mourn. Let us confront this ... It is a good thing that can lead to reconciliation."

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