Two Polish historians are facing libel lawsuit for a book examining Poland’s behavior during World War II, a case whose outcome is expected to determine the future of independent Holocaust research under the Polish nationalist government.
A verdict is expected in Warsaw District Court on Feb. 9 in the case against Barbara Engelking, a historian at the Polish Holocaust Research Center in Warsaw, and Jan Grabowski, a history professor at the University of Ottawa. Although the case is a libel trial, it follows in the wake of a 2018 law that makes it a crime to falsely accuse the Polish nation of crimes committed by Nazi Germany. The law caused a major diplomatic row with Israel.
Since it took power in 2015, Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party has sought to discourage investigations into Polish misconduct during the Nazi occupation, preferring instead to emphasize almost exclusively Polish heroism and suffering. . Critics say the government has condoned the fact that some Poles also cooperated in the murder of Jews.
Israel’s Holocaust Museum Yad Vashem said the legal effort “constitutes a serious attack on free and open investigation.”
A number of other historic institutions have condemned the case as verdict approaches, with the Paris-based Foundation for the Remembrance of the Shoah on Tuesday describing it as a “witch hunt” and a “pernicious invasion at the heart of the investigation.”
The case centers on a 1,600-page, two-part historical work, Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland, which was co-published by Grabowski and Engelking. An abbreviated English version will be published later this year.
Grabowski and Engelking say they see the case as an attempt to discredit them personally and discourage other investigators from investigating the truth about the extermination of Jews in occupied Poland. “This is a case of the Polish state against freedom of inquiry,” Grabowski told Associated Press Monday.
Filomena Leszczyńska is suing Grabowski and Engelking for part of the book that mentions her uncle, Edward Malinowski, former mayor of Malinowo village. According to the evidence presented in the book, Malinowski, who is no longer alive, allowed a Jewish woman to survive by helping her to continue as a non-Jew. But the book also cites witnesses who had accused Malinowski of being complicit in the deaths of several dozen Jews in the city.
Malinowski was cleared of collaboration with the Nazis in a trial after the war.
Leszczyńska is demanding 100,000 zloty (£ 19,600) in damages and an apology in the newspapers. She is backed by the Polish League Against Defamation, a group that receives funding from the Polish government. That organization argued that the two scholars were guilty of “defiling the reputation” of a Polish hero, thereby damaging the dignity and pride of all Poles. The lawsuit was filed in court without charge, as permitted under the 2018 law.
Mark Weitzman, director of government affairs for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, called Night Without End a “carefully researched and found book … describing thousands of cases of Polish complicity in the murder of Jews during the Holocaust.”
Germany occupied Poland in 1939, annexed part of it to Germany and directly controlled the rest. The pre-war Polish government and army fled into exile, with the exception of an underground resistance army that fought against the Nazis in the country. Yet a small number worked with the Germans in hunting and murdering Jews, in many cases people who had fled the ghettos and hid in the countryside.
Grabowski said Night Without End was “versatile, and it speaks just as much of Polish virtue. It paints a truthful picture. “
He added, “The Holocaust is not here to help the Polish ego and morale, it is a drama with the deaths of six million people – that seems to have been forgotten by the nationalists.”
Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Paweł Jabloński described the matter as a private matter. “It is everyone’s legal right to seek such remedy in (a) court if they feel their rights have been violated by (another) person or entity,” Jabloński told AP. “The government is not involved in the proceedings, it is a private matter for the court to decide.”
But those who fear the case could stifle independent investigation have a different view.
“The involvement in this process of an organization heavily subsidized by public funds can easily be understood as a form of censorship and an attempt to deter scientists from publishing the results of their research for fear of a lawsuit and the resulting resulting costly lawsuits “said Zygmunt Stępiński, director of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.