Two Polish historians are on trial for defamation over 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 Poland’s nationalist government.
A verdict is expected in the Warsaw District Court on February 9 in the case against Barbara Engelking, a historian of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw, and Jan Grabowski, a professor of history at the University of Ottawa. While the case is a defamation trial, it comes following 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 rift with Israel.
Since gaining power in 2015, the ruling party in Poland has sought to investigate Polish transgressions during the Nazi occupation, preferring to emphasize Polish heroism and suffering almost exclusively. Critics say the government has whitewashed the fact that some Poles also collaborated in the murder of Jews.
Israeli Holocaust Museum Yad Vashem said the legal effort was “a serious attack on free and open research”.
A number of other historical institutions have condemned the case as the verdict approaches, with the Paris-based Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah described on Tuesday as a “witch hunt” and a “pernicious invasion into the heart of research” .
The case focuses on a 1600-page, two-part historical work, Night Without End: The Fate of Jewish in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland, compiled with Grabowski and Engelking. An abridged English version will be published later this year.
Grabowski and Engelking say they see the case as an attempt to personally discredit them and discourage other researchers from investigating the truth about the extermination of Jews in occupied Poland. “This is a case of the Polish state against freedom of research,” Grabowski told the Associated Press on Monday.
Filomena Leszczyńska is suing Grabowski and Engelking for part of the book that her uncle, Edward Malinowski, former mayor of the town of Malinowo, mentions. According to evidence in the book, Malinowski, who is no longer alive, allowed a Jewish woman to survive by helping her succeed as a non-Jew. But the book also quotes witnesses who accused Malinowski of being an accomplice in the deaths of several dozen Jews in the city.
Malinowski was acquitted of collaborating with the Nazis in a post-war trial.
Leszczyńska is demanding 100,000 zlotys (£ 19,600) in damages and an apology in newspapers. She is supported by the Polish League Against Defamation, a group that receives money from the Polish government. The organization argued that the two scholars were guilty of defaming a Polish hero of the good name, and that they had harmed the dignity and pride of all Poles. The lawsuit was filed free of charge in court as permitted under the 2018 Act.
Mark Weitzman, director of government affairs for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, calls Night Without End a ‘carefully researched and obtainable book … outlining thousands of cases of complicity in Poland in the Holocaust’.
Germany occupied Poland in 1939, annexed part of it to Germany and ruled the rest directly. The pre-war Polish government and army fled into exile, except for an underground resistance army that was fighting the Nazis in the country. Yet a small number collaborated with the Germans to hunt down and kill Jews, in many cases people who had fled ghettos and wanted to take refuge in the countryside.
Grabowski said Night Without End was ‘multifaceted’ and it talks just as much about Polish virtue. It paints a true picture. ‘
He added: “The Holocaust is not here to help the Polish ego and morality, it is a drama about the death of six million people – which is apparently forgotten by the nationalists.”
Poland’s Deputy Foreign Minister Paweł Jabloński described the case as a private matter. “It is everyone’s legal right to seek such a remedy in (a) court if they believe that 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 that has to be decided by the court.”
Yet those who fear the case could stifle independent research take a different view.
“The involvement in this trial of an organization that is heavily subsidized by public funds can easily be seen as a form of censorship and an attempt to deter scholars from publishing the results of their research for fear of ‘ a lawsuit and the subsequent expensive lawsuit, “said Zygmunt Stępiński, director of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jewish in Warsaw.