They were obliged to apologize, but would not be compensated

Filmona filed the lawsuit against 81-year-old Szczynska against two prominent Polish scholars, Barbara Englecking and Jan Grabowski, claiming that the two defamed her aunt, Edward Malinowski, when they claimed he was involved in the deaths of Jews. The uncle was mentioned in a short paragraph in the book “An Endless Night: The Fate of Jews in Selected Districts in Occupied Poland”, which is 1,600 pages long and the two were its editors.

Prosecutor Szczynska is supported by the Polish Anti-Defamation League, an organization that fights to portray Poland as responsible for crimes committed on its territory during the Nazi occupation. She claims that Uncle Malinowski was in fact a hero who saved Jews, and blames the researchers for the mistakes they made in their research. Malinowski was prosecuted after World War II for an incident in which Germans murdered 18 Jews in a forest near the village of Malinovo in 1943, but in 1950 he was acquitted by a communist court of involvement.

The Polish Anti-Defamation League claims that in their actions the two investigators defamed an innocent man and robbed his niece of her rights, including the protection of her aunt’s and her family’s good name and the right to pride and national identity.

In the lawsuit, she demanded that Szczynska receive compensation in the amount of 100,000 zlotys ($ 27,000) and publish an apology. The court today contented itself with ordering the two to apologize, and refrained from ruling that they must compensate her with money. The judge justified her decision not to charge the two with compensation by saying that “the court’s ruling must not have a cooling effect for academic research, and a ruling on compensation in the amount required must, in our opinion, have such an effect.”

Leshchinska’s lawyer, Monica Bezuzowska Psyka, said tonight that Leshchinska was very pleased with the decision, because the issue of compensation was secondary to her, and the most important thing for her is that the court ruled that she was right. The two investigators, for their part, have already announced that they intend to appeal the decision to a higher court.

Grabowski, a Polish-Canadian professor of history at the University of Ottawa, and Anglecking, the founder and director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Studies in Warsaw, are some of the most prominent Holocaust scholars in Poland, and co-authored parts of the book alongside several other scholars. The two see the lawsuit as an attempt to undermine the credibility of all the findings presented in the book and to deter scholars from continuing to investigate and reveal truths about the involvement of Poles in the execution of Jews by the Germans.

Attorney Pasika, representing prosecutor Leshchinska, denied that the lawsuit was an attempt to infringe on Holocaust research as a whole or on freedom of expression, and said the civil lawsuit was filed by people who felt their family had been discriminated against for no wrong. “The ruling will determine whether the investigators properly examined the sources, formulated accurate assessments regarding those sources and used an appropriate research method,” she said before the court ruled.

Three million of the 3.3 million Jews living in Poland before World War II were murdered after the occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany. Apart from them, more than two million other Poles were also murdered, most of them Christians, and thousands of Poles were later recognized from time to time for risking their lives to save Jews. However, among the Poles there were also those who betrayed Jews to the Germans and were complicit in their murder. In the years after the war, in the communist era of Poland, the discussion of these deeds was considered taboo, and in recent years a storm has arisen in the country whenever such deeds have come up for public discussion.

The defamation lawsuit in which the court ruled today aroused international interest because it came in the background of concern in the world of the war waged by the Polish government against attempts to hold a public hearing regarding the responsibility of Poles for crimes in the Holocaust. The conservative “Law and Justice Party” that holds power in Poland sees any attempt to investigate the participation of Poles in the murder of Jews in the Holocaust as a violation of state dignity. Just last week, journalist Katzina Markusz was summoned for questioning by the police on suspicion of slandering Poland, due to an article in which she used the words “Polish participation in the Holocaust.” The maximum penalty for the offense for which she is suspected is three years in prison.

Senior members of Poland’s Jewish community issued a statement yesterday warning that they were witnessing growing attempts to oppress historians and journalists who were sincerely trying to portray the fate of Polish Jews under Nazi occupation. The conservative government of Poland and its allies do not deny the fact that some Poles harmed Jews during the Holocaust, but say their focus on the role of some in the acts obscures the fact that most of them were carried out under German orders and under their threats. The government argues that it is forbidden to devote itself to “clothing education”, and this claim is supported by many Poles.

The Polish Anti-Defamation League, which has sided with prosecutor Leszczynska, supports the same ideology of the Polish ruling party, and scholars see this as evidence that the prosecution is part of the government’s campaign to promote the historical narrative it wants to control the Polish public.

The book “Endless Night” tells the stories of Jews who fled the Nazis and tried to hide. Among other things, it mentions Jews who survived thanks to the help of Poles, but at the same time there is also much evidence of cases in which Poles cooperated with the Nazis and handed over Jews to them.

At the center of the lawsuit filed by Szczynska against the investigators is a testimony given in 1996 by a Jewish woman born in Poland named Esther Siamiatica, who later changed her name to Maria Wiltgren. Wiltergren, who is no longer alive, then described Malinowski, the plaintiff’s aunt, as someone who helped her survive in an “Aryan” identity when he hid her among Poles sent to work in Germany after buying forged documents. However, she said he also cheated on her and stole money and property from her, and her two sons testified that she saw him as a “bad man”.

The book states that Wiltgren “came to the realization that he had collaborated and assisted in the murder of several dozen Jews who were hiding in the woods and extradited to the Germans, but she defended him through false testimony when he was tried after the war.” Engelking, who wrote the episode, admitted only one mistake was made in it: in the book she noted that when Wiltergren was in Germany during the war she traded with Malinowski, but did not make it clear that it was another man of the same name. She emphasizes that this mistake had no effect on the larger question regarding the man’s attitude toward Jews.

In its ruling today, the judge ruled that the investigators would have to publish a written apology in which they would make it clear that they had provided incorrect information when they claimed that Malinowski had robbed Wiltsgren and contributed to the deaths of Jews hiding in a forest near Malinovo. They are also required to make it clear that they apologize for the plaintiff’s “injury to dignity.”

Leshchinska’s lawyer presented additional details she said the authors erred in, such as the fact that Anglecking wrote that according to Wiltgren several dozen Jews were murdered as a result of Malinowski’s actions, while in practice he was prosecuted for 18 cases, and as stated acquits. Englecking replied that these additional allegations raised by the prosecution concerned marginal matters, and that it meant that its critics had failed to find actual deficiencies in the book.