Poland And The Holocaust

 

POLAND

Historicity’s Folly

A Polish court ruled against two renowned Holocaust researchers Tuesday in a case that could set an important precedent regarding independent research of the Holocaust in Poland, the Associated Press reported.

Judges ordered scholars Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski to formally apologize to 81-year-old Filomena Leszczynska, who said her deceased uncle had been slandered in a historical work.

Leszczynska’s uncle, Edward Malinowski, was a Polish hero who had saved Jews, the family said. The researchers briefly mentioned Malinowski in their work, writing that had robbed a Jewish woman during World War II and was complicit in the death of 18 Jews in 1943, when Poland was under German occupation. He was acquitted by a court in Poland in 1950 of involvement in the deaths.

The case has been monitored closely internationally as it comes amid a broader attempt by Poland’s conservative government to whitewash Polish involvement in the Holocaust, say critics: In 2018, the ruling Law and Justice Party tried to criminalize falsely blaming Poland for Holocaust crimes but squashed the law after it sparked a diplomatic dispute with Israel.

Engelking and Grabowski criticized the ruling as an attempt to discredit their overall findings and discourage other researchers investigating Polish involvement in the Holocaust. Engelking said she plans to appeal the ruling.

Following Nazi Germany’s invasion in 1939, Poland’s population was subjected to mass murder and slave labor. About three million Jews and more than two million Christian Poles were murdered.

Poland’s conservative authorities don’t deny that some Poles harmed Jews but they believe the focus on Polish wrongdoing obscures the fact that most of these killings occurred under German orders and terror even as some pogroms continued after Nazi Germany’s defeat, historians say.