“The past is never dead. It isn’t even past,” William Faulkner famously wrote. While he was writing of his native Mississippi, he could have been describing Poland.

The past weighs heavily in Warsaw. It underlies the desire for a permanent U.S. troop presence. It influences a government move to oust Supreme Court judges that pits Poland against the European Union. So does resistance to migration from the Middle East. And the past is unavoidable in controversy over Polish legislation criminalizing certain speech about the Holocaust.