Read this remarkable piece by Ben Macintyre about the huge collection of papers and other material deliberately buried by heroic Polish Jews during the Warsaw Ghetto disaster of WW2.

They knew what they were doing:

The compilers of this archive knew they were doomed, and framed their project as an act of intellectual resistance to totalitarianism. “History is usually written by the victor,” wrote one of the team. “Should our murderers be victorious, should they write the history of this war, our destruction will be presented as one of the most beautiful pages of world history. Or they may wipe out our memory altogether.”

In Warsaw there is a fine collection of rare coins, including wonderful early English examples. This collection too was buried as the Nazis attacked (if I recall correctly under the National Museum itself), only to be thought lost but unearthed after Communism ended when someone (now elderly) involved in the plan came forward to describe the hiding place.

And remember Kragujevac in Serbia, where the Nazis rounded up many hundreds men and boys and executed them. They too knew they were doomed and wrote messages to their families on the scraps of paper they had with them. Many of those messages are on display in the museum. Unbearably awful and poignant.

Maybe this explains why so much of modern politics is so unforgiving.

The winners want to control the Present so as to control the Future and the Past alike. A lot at stake.