ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a sociological description of the social process of the creation of Warsaw's local cultural memory of the Second World War. The analysis is based on a variety of sources, including recorded observations, photographs of the memorials, historical and artistic studies, and opinions collected in surveys and expressed by the media and internet users at historical and community portals. The analysis covers a dozen or so war memorials in Warsaw. The chapter illustrates the changes taking place in the practices of commemorating selected events, changes in collective memory and in the politics of memory. Researching the social history of the successive 'generations' of Warsaw's war memorials has proved helpful in describing its context. The first layer is the narrative of the Polish pro-Soviet authorities of that time, national as well as municipal, described as vae victis. The other one is the narrative created and articulated in the Home Army milieu, defined as gloria victis.
