JERUSALEM (AP) – Israeli Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial said on Thursday it was “deeply upset” over the implications of a libel case in Poland, in which two leading Holocaust investigators were ordered to apologize to a woman for following allegation slandered her uncle over his wartime.
Advocates for 81-year-old Filomena Leszczynska argued that the scholars slandered her late uncle, Edward Malinowski, by indicating that he had helped kill Jews during World War II. The family says he saved Jews during the German occupation of Poland.
Her supporters portray the controversial case as a defense of Polish national pride, while critics say it threatens the future of independent Holocaust research at a time when authorities are promoting a nationalist story contrary to ordinary science. .
In a separate development, the Israeli embassy in Warsaw criticized the appointment of a former member of a radical right-wing group to a position in the country’s state-run historical institute.
In a statement on the defamation case, Yad Vashem stressed the importance of academic freedom and said that any attempt to restrict it through political or legal pressure was “unacceptable”.
It defends the two researchers, Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski, and the book they co-edited and co-authored: “Night Without End: The Fate of Jewish in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland.”
“As with all research, this volume on the plight of Jews during the Holocaust is part of an ongoing discussion and is subject to criticism in academia, but not in courts,” Yad Vashem said.
Grabowski, a Polish-Canadian professor of history at the University of Ottawa, and Engelking, founder and director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw, is one of the most prominent Holocaust researchers in Poland.
The University of Ottawa has issued a statement pledging its “unwavering support” to Grabowski and reiterating its commitment to academic freedom.
Poland was occupied by Nazi Germany during the war and its population was subjected to mass murder and slave labor. While 3 million of the country’s 3.3 million Jews were killed, more than 2 million were mostly Christians. Poland resisted the Nazis at home and abroad and never cooperated as a state with the Third Reich. Thousands of Poles were recognized by Yad Vashem for risking their own lives to save Jews.
Amid the more than five years of occupation, there were also individual Poles who betrayed Jews to the Germans. The subject was taboo during the communist era, and every new revelation of the Polish transgressions in recent years caused a setback.
Leszczynska is supported by the Polish League against Defamation, which is ideologically in line with the ruling party of Poland. Scholars believe the case is part of an attempt by the government to promote a story of flawless heroism regarding the occupation.
Stanislaw Zaryn, the spokesperson for the secret services in Poland, accused the media of “slandering Poland in the international arena” and harming the country’s “information security” by reporting on the case.
The Israeli embassy meanwhile said it was “surprised” to learn that Tomasz Greniuch, the newly appointed head of the Wroclaw branch of the Institute of National Remembrance, “saw nothing wrong with raising his hand in the Nazi salute not.’
According to Polish media, in the past Greniuch raised his hand in a Nazi salute and organized demonstrations commemorating anti-Semitic riots before World War II. The state-run institute defended the appointment, saying he was still young at the time.
“In Poland, in a country that has suffered so much from the Nazi occupation, there should be no place for the use of Nazi symbols,” the embassy said.
This encouraged Greniuch to visit the Auschwitz Museum in the former death camp, where Nazi German forces killed 1.1 million people in occupied Poland.
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Associated Press author Vanessa Gera in Warsaw, Poland, contributed to this report.