Polish prime minister, education minister slammed Dr. Barbara Engelking for saying Poles “failed” Jews in WWII, threatening to defund her institute.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Over 300 institutions and academics from around the world have risen to defend a noted Polish Holocaust historian from her government’s attack on her after she stated that Poles “failed” their Jewish fellow citizens during World War II.

The historical groups and professors, including Yad Vashem, the foremost Holocaust documentation, research, education and commemoration institute in the world, issued a statement Thursday condemning Warsaw for its threats against Dr. Barbara Engelking, founder and director of the Polish Center of Holocaust Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences.

“We regard such censorious tendencies and the notion that the continued financing of academic institutions should be conditional upon whether the research produced within them meets the expectations of politicians, as extremely dangerous and unacceptable,” the statement says in part.

“Such actions are aimed at discouraging other scholars from undertaking research that might be met with a similar hate campaign.”

Engelking condemned Poles for their antisemitic behavior after the Nazis took over their country in an interview on Poland’s largest private channel, marking the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on April 19th. She said that her countrymen often “falsif[y] history” in overstating how much they helped Jews when the Germans were hunting them down, and that Jews were “unbelievably disappointed with Poles during the war.”

“Poles had the potential to become allies of the Jews, and one would hope that they would behave differently, that they would be neutral, kind, that they would not take advantage of the situation to such an extent and that there would not be widespread blackmailing,” she said in another part of the interview.

“Poles simply failed,” she said.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki slammed the noted scholar, who has published several books in multiple languages on such subjects as the survival strategies of Jews in Warsaw and on the fate of Jews seeking refuge in Polish villages during the Holocaust. In a tweet of well over 800 words, he criticized her “scandalous opinions” regarding her coreligionists’ behavior, firing back that “We know that there could be tens, if not hundreds of thousands” of cases where Poles saved Jews.

Her statements were part of “an anti-Polish narrative,” he said, as blame for the murder of Polish Jewry rested squarely on Germany.

The Nazis held Poland in their totalitarian grip for over five years.

Education Minister Przemysław Czarnek threatened to defund Engelking’s institute, saying, “I will not finance an institute that maintains the kind of people who simply insult Poles.”

Poles “were the greatest allies of the Jews, and if it had not been for the Poles, many Jews would have died, many more than were killed in the Holocaust,” he claimed.

Of the 3.3 million Jews who lived in pre-War Poland, only 380,000 survived, according to Yad Vashem’s research.

The state broadcasting authority jumped into the act as well, opening legal proceedings against TVN, because “if the guest on a program is lying, the journalist must tell viewers that it is a lie.” TVN is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered in New York.

Morawiecki and his nationalist Law and Justice Party made a point of passing a law in 2018 that prescribes criminal proceedings for individuals or organizations who allegedly defame the “Polish nation” by assigning guilt or complicity to Poles for Holocaust crimes committed on Polish soil.

It was widely condemned at the time as an attempt to portray Poles solely as Nazi victims and whitewash the role so many of them played in aiding their oppressors’ mission to wipe out the Jewish people.

While readily acknowledging the heroism of over 7,000 Poles in saving Jews during the Holocaust, who are documented by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations, the Israeli government also saw the law as a distortion of the truth. Knesset members across the political spectrum called it an attempt to deny the Holocaust, and tensions arose between the countries’ administrations.

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Polish government’s campaign to control Holocaust research set to continue, warns Jan Grabowski, historian at center of major libel trial.

By Ben Cohen, The Algemeiner

The historian at the center of a precedent-setting, Holocaust-related libel case in Poland warned on Tuesday that next year’s commemorations of the 80th anniversary of the deportation of more than 250,000 Warsaw Jews to the Treblinka extermination camp could be compromised by the country’s nationalist government.

“In 2022, we will have the 80th anniversary of the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto — let’s see whether the Polish government can resist the temptation to use this occasion to celebrate Polish virtue,” Prof. Jan Grabowski told The Algemeiner in an extensive telephone interview.

“If it was to become a joyful festival for nationalists to celebrate how ‘we helped our neighbors,’ that would be a catastrophe from a historical perspective,” said Grabowski, a specialist on Polish-Jewish relations during the Nazi occupation who teaches at the University of Ottawa in Canada.

Together with his colleague, the Polish scholar Dr. Barbara Engelking, Grabowski was ordered by a court in Warsaw on Feb. 9 to apologize to the plaintiff, who brought her case to court under legislation passed by the Polish parliament in 2018 that subjects historians and others who research Polish civilian collusion with the Nazi occupation to civil libel suits.

The law has served as the central instrument of a broader campaign by Poland’s conservative nationalist government to depict Poles solely as victims of the Nazis who saved their Jewish neighbors whenever they were able to do so — a version of World War II history that Grabowski described as “mythology.”

At issue in the libel case was a brief passage in Engelking and Grabowski’s 1,600 page volume “Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties in Occupied Poland” that dealt with Edward Malinowski, the mayor of the town of Malinowo in north-eastern Poland, who was alleged to have assisted in the capture and killing by the Germans of 22 Jews hiding in a nearby forest.

The passage was based on the testimony of a Jewish woman who survived the war and knowingly gave false evidence in Malinowski’s defense when he was tried and acquitted by a Communist court in 1950 on charges of collaboration.

Malinowski’s niece, 81-year-old Filomena Leszczynska, accused Engelking and Grabowski of publishing false accusations against her uncle, insisting that he was a hero who had saved Jews. The court’s decision in her favor means that Engelking and Grabowski have to furnish Leszczynska with a written apology for supposedly presenting “inaccurate information” about her uncle and for “violating his honor.”

‘Might of the Polish state and the Polish media’

Earlier on Tuesday, Grabowksi spoke about the libel case at an online seminar organized by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. An audience of more than 700 heard Grabowski tell the event’s host, the writer Masha Gessen, that he and Engelking had been compelled to “confront the entire might of the Polish state and the Polish media, who decided that we were guilty a long time ago.”

In particular, Grabowski pointed to the role of Poland’s government-run Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) — whose name was incorporated into the title of the 2018 legislation targeting historical research into civilian collaboration —  in aggressively pushing the notion of Poles as victims who rescued Jews en masse from the ravages of the Germans.

“The IPN is weaponized to the tune of 120 million dollars per year to run the official historical narrative,” Grabowski told the YIVO event.

In his later conversation with The Algemeiner, Grabowski further scorned the IPN’s pretensions to academic credibility.

“I refuse to identify as ‘historians’ those people employed by the IPN as ‘historians,’” Grabowski said. “For me, a historian is someone who identifies an area of interest, and then struggles with the rest of us for funding in peer-reviewed competition. But what you have here are large number of state employees to do the state’s bidding.”

Asked how Poland’s IPN differed from Yad Vashem — Israel’s state-run memorial to the Holocaust which also engages in historical research — Grabowski was adamant that there was no comparison to begin with.

“Yad Vashem is not a blind tool in the hands of the State of Israel — it is an institution of a democratic state, and that is the difference,” Grabowski said. He emphasized that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been strongly criticized by scholars at Yad Vashem for his own comments on Poland’s Holocaust record on more than one occasion.

Grabowski and Engleking are now awaiting the outcome of their appeal against the Feb. 9 decision. Should the appeal fail, that would effectively mean, according to Grabowski, “an end to independent research of the Holocaust and many other parts of Polish history that run contrary to the official myths and legends espoused by the Polish state.”

‘I’m afraid that’s just the beginning’

Younger Polish scholars of the Holocaust would be especially vulnerable to such pressure, Grabowski observed, to the point that many would deem it prudent to direct future research into other areas.

“We humanists are fragile creatures who depend on grants,” he said. “If the state controls 90 or 95 percent of grant activities, then anything that smacks of an attack on national mythology will not be funded. And I’m afraid that’s just the beginning: older, more established scholars will practice self-censorship or just steer clear of these topics. PhD researchers will sail in different directions.”

Amid this gloomy prognosis for historical scholarship is the broader question of the Polish state’s role when it comes to the international commemoration of the Holocaust, along with efforts to educate future generations about the extermination of six million Jews and several million members of other groups by the Third Reich.

“I would treat the Polish authorities as one would treat a dishonest trading partner,” Grabowski candidly answered, when asked how outside governments and organizations should approach the Polish government when it comes to Holocaust memorial days, school visits to concentration camps and other Holocaust sites, conferences, exhibitions and myriad similar projects that involve the country.

“You watch that person’s hands very closely,” Grabowski said. “You cannot avoid trading with them, but you have to be careful.”

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 Judge Ewa Jonczyk ruled that historians Dr. Barbara Engelking and Prof. Jan Grabowski must apologize to the plaintiff in the case.

By Ben Cohen, The Algemeiner

The ruling on Tuesday by a Polish court against two leading scholars of the Holocaust on trial for libel sent a chill throughout the Jewish world, as community and academic leaders warned that independent research into the Nazi persecution of the Jews during World War II would be stifled as a consequence.

The much anticipated decision by Judge Ewa Jonczyk of the District Court in Warsaw ruled that historians Dr. Barbara Engelking and Prof. Jan Grabowski must apologize to the plaintiff in the case. However, they will not be forced to pay her 100,000 zlotys ($27,000) in compensation, as her lawyers had demanded.

At issue was a brief passage in Engelking and Grabowski’s 1,600 page volume “Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties in Occupied Poland” that dealt with Edward Malinowski, a Polish civilian alleged to have assisted in the capture and killing of Jews hiding in a forest near Malinowo in north-eastern Poland.

The passage noted that a Jewish woman who was familiar with Malinowski had given false testimony in his defense after the war, despite her knowledge that he was “an accomplice in the deaths of several dozen Jews who had been hiding in the woods and had been turned over to the Germans.”

Malinowski’s niece, 81-year-old Filomena Leszczynska, accused the scholars of fabricating her uncle’s crimes, insisting that he was a hero who had saved Jews.

The court’s decision means that Engelking and Grabowski are obliged to provide Leszczynska with a written apology for having provided “inaccurate information” about her uncle and for “violating his honor.” They are expected to pursue an appeal.

Jewish leaders slammed Tuesday’s ruling as another attempt by the Polish authorities to police the research of the Holocaust so as to expunge any discussion of Polish civilian collaboration with the Nazis. Under Poland’s criminal code as well as legislation passed by the country’s parliament in 2018, anyone who examines the issue of local collusion during the Nazi occupation of 1939-45 can face a civil libel trial and possible imprisonment.

“It’s another sad day in Polish-Jewish history,” Abraham Foxman — a survivor of the Holocaust in Poland and the national director emeritus of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) — told The Algemeiner on Tuesday afternoon.

“As hard as Poland tries, it cannot hide the truth,” Foxman said. “Yes, there was honor in Poland during the Holocaust. I was saved by a Polish Catholic woman, Jan Karski risked his life to alert the world to the Holocaust. But there was collaboration, there was ugliness and anti-Semitism.”

Foxman noted that it was a sad fact that “while some Poles risked their lives to save Jews, many more collaborated and joined in the persecution.”

Said Foxman: “No Polish legislation or court decision can change the truth.”

Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress (WJC), declared himself “dismayed” by the ruling “in the misguided libel case that was brought against” the two historians.

“It is simply unacceptable that historians should be afraid of citing credible testimony of Holocaust survivors,” Lauder said in a statement.

Lauder added that Tuesday’s court decision “does not bode well for the future of historical research in Poland and sends precisely the wrong message to those who seek to stifle the work of scholars.” He expressed the hope that the verdict would be overturned on appeal.

Meanwhile, in comments to the Polish news outlet Wyborcza on Monday as he awaited the ruling, Prof. Grabowski highlighted the role of right-wing, government-backed NGOs — or “gongos” — in pressing the legal case against himself and Dr. Engelking.

One particular group, the Polish League Against Defamation, provided the financial backing for Leszczynska’s libel case against the two scholars.

Founded in 2013 by Maciej Świrski, the League Against Defamation is closely tied with Poland’s ruling nationalist Law and Justice Party. Formed to fight what it calls “anti-Polonism,” the group has previously brought libel actions against the US publication Newsweek and the Spanish daily El Pais. It has also received a $75,000 grant from Poland’s foreign ministry to monitor and counter anti-Polish sentiment in the international media.

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