Poland Leads Wave of Communist-Era Reckoning in Europe Piotr Malecki for The New York Times Wojciech Rostenis in the archive section of Poland's Institute of National Remembrance. WARSAW - For all that Poland has accomplished since the fall of the Iron Curtain, it has long resisted fully coming to terms with its Communist past - the oppression, the spying, even the massacres. Society preferred to forget, to move on. So it may come as a surprise that Poland and many of its neighbors in Central and Eastern Europe have decided the time is right to deal with the unfinished business. Suddenly there is a wave of accounting in the form of government actions and cultural explorations, some seeking closure, others payback. A court in Poland last month found that the Communist leaders behind the imposition of martial law in December 1981 were part of a "criminal group." Bulgaria's president is trying to purge ambassadors who served as security agents. The Macedonian government is busy hunting for collaborators, and Hungary's new Constitution allows legal action against former Communists. On Sunday in Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel nominated as the next president a former pastor and East German activist, Joachim Gauck, who turned the files of the Ministry for State Security - better known as the Stasi - into a permanent archive. "In order to defend ourselves in the future against other totalitarian regimes, we have to understand how they worked in the past, like a vaccine," said Lukasz Kaminski, the president of Poland's Institute of National Remembrance. Across Central and Eastern Europe, a consensus of silence appears to have ended, one that never muted all criticism and discussion but did muffle voices crying out for a long-awaited reckoning. Reconciling with the past is an issue that has hovered over post-Communist Europe for decades. But today that experience has broader global resonance, serving as a point of discussion across the Arab world where popular revolts have cast off long-serving dictators, raising similarly uncomfortable questions about individual complicity in autocratic regimes. Arab nations are forced to grapple with the same issues of guilt and responsibility that Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe are once again beginning to seriously mine. Time makes the past easier to confront, less threatening, but no less urgent to resolve. The experience here, however, suggests that it may be years, decades perhaps, before the Arab world can be expected to look inward. The sudden turn to the past in Europe is not just in the realm of politics and justice. There have been trials and verdicts, but also dramas and documentaries, thrillers and histories, all seeking closure to a past that refuses to be forgotten. In Poland, nearly one million people have filled theaters to watch Antoni Krauze's "Black Thursday," a film exploring an episode in 1970 when government troops gunned down dozens of protesters in Gdynia and other cities on Poland's Baltic Coast. It took Mr. Krauze four decades to make the film. First he was wary of Communist censors and then stymied by public apathy. The movie was a hit last year precisely because of the unsettling subject matter: unarmed protestors and innocent bystanders are shot in the streets or sadistically beaten in police stations. "In the beginning of the "90s, people thought it wasn't right to go back to those times," Mr. Krauze, 72, said over coffee recently in a bustling Warsaw shopping center. Poland is wrestling with its past on multiple fronts. After years of legal action, the court that ruled on the Communist leaders from 1981, when martial law was imposed, gave just a two-year suspended sentence to the interior minister at the time, Czeslaw Kiszczak. Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the former Communist leader of Poland who declared martial law, was found medically unfit to stand trial last year. In Bulgaria, the newly elected president promised to remove ambassadors and diplomats who worked with the Communist state security apparatus, even as it was recently revealed that 11 of the country's 15 highest-ranking bishops were former agents; the president's plan has run into opposition in the courts. In Macedonia, part of the former Yugoslavia, the constitutional court last month temporarily halted government plans to expand the search for former agents and collaborators. Joanna Berendt contributed reporting.