WARSAW, Poland (AP) – Two Polish historians are facing a defamation trial for a scientific study of Polish behavior during World War II, a case whose outcome is expected to determine the fate of independent Holocaust research among the Nationalist government of Poland.
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.
This is the first major legal test following a 2018 law it 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 the Conservative ruling party, Law and Justice, gained power in 2015, he tried to discourage investigations into Polish transgressions during the German occupation during the war, preferring to emphasize Polish heroism and suffering almost exclusively. . The aim is to promote national pride – but according to critics, the government has whitewashed the fact that some Poles also collaborated on the German murder of Jews.
The 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 Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah in Paris. to describe it Tuesday as a “witch hunt” and a “pernicious intrusion into the core of research.”
The case is about a 1600-page, two-part historical work in Polish, “Night Without End: The Fate of Jewish in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland”, which was co-edited by Grabowski and Engelking. In a few months, an abridged English version will appear.
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 Poland.
“This is a case of the Polish state against freedom of research,” Grabowski told The Associated Press on Monday.
Grabowski, a Polish-Canadian whose father was a Polish Holocaust survivor, faced significant anti-Semitic harassment by nationalists, both online and during lectures in Canada, France and elsewhere.
The niece of a man in the town of Malinowo, whose wartime behavior is briefly mentioned, is suing Grabowski and Engelking, demanding 100,000 zlotys ($ 27,000) in damages and an apology in newspapers.
According to evidence in the book, Edward Malinowski, an elder in the village, allowed a Jewish woman to survive by helping her succeed as a non-Jew. But the survivor is also quoted as saying he was an accomplice in the deaths of several dozen Jews.
The cousin, Filomena Leszczynska, was supported by a group, the Polish League Against Defamation, which received money from the Polish government.
That organization argued that the two scholars were guilty of defaming the ‘good name’ of a Polish hero who, according to them, played no role in harming Jews, and that they had the dignity and pride of all Poland has suffered. 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, called “Night Without End”, a “carefully researched and obtainable book … detailing thousands of cases of complicity in Poland in the Holocaust during the Holocaust.”
“The proceedings against these two scholars of international repute are nothing more than an attempt to use the legal system to muzzle and intimidate the science of the Holocaust in Poland,” Weitzman said.
Germany occupied Poland in 1939, annexed part of it to Germany and ruled the rest directly. Unlike other countries occupied by Germany, there was no co-operative government in Poland. 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 some people in Poland 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” is “versatile, and it talks just as much about Polish virtue. It paints a true picture.”
“The Holocaust is not here to help the Polish ego and morals, it is a drama about the death of 6 million people – which is apparently forgotten by the nationalists,” he said.
A Deputy Foreign Minister Pawel Jablonski described the case as a private matter.
“It is everyone’s legal right to seek such a remedy before (a) the court if they believe that their rights have been violated by (another) person or entity,” Jablonski said in a statement to the AP said. “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 Stepinski, director of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.