“This act of vandalism is more than an ugly attack on an internationally renowned scholar. It is an attack on academic freedom, on the historical record, and on Holocaust remembrance.”

By Adina Katz, World Israel News

Renowned Polish-Canadian historian Jan Grabowski, whose research into Poland’s complicity during the Holocaust has infuriated Polish leaders, was the victim of assault on Tuesday in Warsaw, Yad Vashem said in a press release the following day.

During a lecture by Grabowski, a member of the Polish parliament smashed a microphone on the speaker’s podium and tried to rip out the sound system in order to prevent him from lecturing at the German Historical Institute.

The press release did not mention the lawmaker by name, but a social media post identified him as Grzegorz Braun.

The topic of the lecture. Grabowski said, was “Poland’s (growing) problem with the history of the Holocaust. The lecture, hosted by the German Historical Institute and the Department of History at the University of Warsaw shall be given in Polish.”

You are warmly invited to my lecture about Poland’s (growing) problem with the history of the Holocaust. The lecture, hosted by the German Historical Institute and the Department of History at the University of Warsaw shall be given in Polish.https://t.co/jNs0Eu32jX

— jan grabowski (@jgrabows) May 25, 2023

Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan issued a statement, saying that the “incident represents a new low in attempts to stifle discussion about the complicity of Poles in the persecution and murder of their Jewish neighbors during the Holocaust.

“This act of vandalism is more than an ugly attack on an internationally renowned scholar. It is an attack on academic freedom, on the historical record, and on Holocaust remembrance,” Dayan said.

In 2018, Poland passed a law banning the phrase “Polish death camp,” in an apparent effort to absolve itself of complicity with the Nazis. The notorious Auschwitz death camp, for example, was located in Poland and administered by locals. Even after the end of World War 2, antisemitism was rampant in the country.

Best known among Polish anti-Semitic crimes in the immediate postwar years was the 1946 pogrom in the town of Kielce, during which 42 Jews were murdered.

Holocaust experts say that while Poland is “technically correct” when they say the concentration camps  were German, the legislation is being exploited in an attempt to clear Poles of the murder of so many Jews.

Grabowski, a leading historian, has refused to whitewash the facts.

In February 2021, a Polish court ruled against Profs. Grabowski and Barbara Engelking, both leading scholars, saying they must apologize for their research that “violated the honor” of Edward Malinowski, a Polish civilian alleged to have assisted in the capture and killing of Jews hiding in a forest near Malinowo in northeastern Poland. Jewish leaders slammed the ruling.

‘Some people exchanged punches’

Grabowski was apparently not the only victim of violence.

Although not mentioned in the Yad Vashem Press release, Aleksander Milchtach Slaw, a senior jounalist at Radio Shalom in Copenhagen, described the outrageous attack in a Facebook post tagging Grabowski, which included photos of the incident.

“Just a few words to let you know that my lecture at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw has been interrupted by Polish radical right-wing MP Grzegorz Braun. Ten minutes into the lecture, Braun stood up, wrestled the microphone away from me, repeatedly crushed it against the podium, and later destroyed the loudspeakers. Several of his supporters shielded him. Police showed up after some time, but they were powerless to remove him because Braun quoted his MP immunity,” Slaw wrote.

“It was mayhem and chaos. Some people exchanged punches. I have never seen anything like it in my long academic career. I was scheduled to talk about the rising wave of fascism in Poland. Now, I don’t have to – a few pictures will do the job. I must say, I am still shaken. It is not every day that you stare fascism straight in the eye. In Poland, we have transitioned to another stage: violence,” Slaw concluded.

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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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