I will define concepts of cultural heritage and difficult heritage as well as elementary distinctions between them. Unlike affirmative cultural heritage, difficult heritage evokes different emotions such as discomfort, sadness, shame, anger. Difficult heritage is oftentimes problematic due to the past it refers to and which one tries to forget or deny because it conveys an ideological legacy of a certain history period, namely an ideology in which it emerged. Thus one might assume that such difficult heritage will be neglected compared to affirmative heritage in a sense of cultural policy, finance, visibility in a certain community and so on. However, the attitude towards difficult heritage of a certain community can be switched by changing the dominant ideology or political system. By doing that such heritage can become more visible in a society, especially if such heritage used to be denied. I will provide an overview of such society changes in the empirical part of this paper where I will present and analyse the three examples of a difficult heritage in the world and in Croatia. I will present the case of Berlin wall that used to separate a nation, but two ideologies, and the case of cultural heritage of Saami people in Sweden where there was a certain amount of dealing with past in which Saami were oppressed. The Croatian case is presented by the Memorial for the holocaust and the Ustasha regime victims which caused controversy even before it was constructed. The examples mentioned above all have certain interpretation difficulties, but each of them, depending on the nation, implies a different level of awareness about the need for conserving such heritage. In this regard, the paper will also address the ethical issues in the interpretation and preservation of the difficult heritage.