Trial in Poland: Holocaust historians have to apologize

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Deportation of Warsaw Jews (1943): betrayed, blackmailed, murdered

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DPA

"After that is only night" is not easy reading.

The 1700 pages in two volumes are aimed at an academic audience.

There are shockingly detailed regional studies from one of the darkest chapters of German-Polish history: In 1943 the Nazis occupied Poland, murdered many thousands of Jews, deported them to concentration camps and brutally evacuated the ghettos.

Around 300,000 were able to escape for the time being and wander through the forests, depending on the help of non-Jewish Poles.

Many protect and hide them, at risk of death, because it carries the death penalty.

Others betray the helpless people, deliver them to the German machinery of extermination.

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Holocaust researcher Barbara Engelking: appointment announced

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The professional world is impressed by this work published in 2018: "After that is only night" brings research on the Holocaust an "enormous increase in knowledge," writes the historian Ingo Loose from the Institute for Contemporary History Munich-Berlin - and yet the authors must now apologize for their work.

A Warsaw court sentenced the two history professors Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski in a sensational trial.

Filomena Leszczynska, 80, from the tiny town of Malinowo in eastern Poland had sued.

She is upset that Engelking and Grabowski have accused their long-dead uncle Edward Malinowski of collaboration.

He is said to have been complicit in the murder of a few dozen Jews, including women and children.

Poles fell victim to the Germans

In court it was about a tiny passage only a few lines long.

The civil process is part of a decades-long dispute over Polish history.

Above all, Poles, whether Jews or not, fell victim to the Germans in World War II.

The Yad Vashem memorial in Israel lists 6,500 Poles as saviors of the Jews.

But there was also the opposite: To what extent did Poles support the Germans in mass murder?

Filomena Leszczynska's complaint was initiated by the government-affiliated foundation "Fortress of the Good Name" and assumed the costs.

The lawyers argued in court that Uncle Edward was really a savior of the Jews.

Leszczynska saw the memory of the relative degraded by the passage in the textbook.

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Historian Jan-Grabowski: Dispute over a tiny passage from 1700 pages of complete works

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The lawyers demanded 100,000 zloty (22,500 euros) as compensation.

However, the court did not uphold this claim in its - not yet legally binding - decision.

Engelking and Grabowski are supposed to apologize to Leszczynska because of "giving inaccurate information" in the historical work.

Also, the paragraph in the book that deals with her uncle should be changed in future editions.

The two historians, who also work at the Center for Holocaust Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, want to appeal because they do not agree with some of the formulations in the apology requested.

Barbara Engelking was relieved that there was no fine - otherwise she would have »had to sell her apartment«.

Those who write scientific books also have the right to make mistakes.

This is usually clarified through reviews or corrected in a second edition, but not heard in court.

Colleagues from all over the world jumped at them: Freedom of research is at risk if courts decide what scientists may or may not write.

Eva Schlotheuber warned against an "enormous intimidation potential": Great damage would result for society if well-founded research results "are not negotiated in scientific or public discourse, but in court," said the chairwoman of the Association of Historians in Germany (VHD) .

The World Jewish Congress also criticized the verdict: It was "simply unacceptable if historians should be afraid of quoting credible statements from Holocaust survivors."

Monumental historical image

The national-conservative government in Warsaw already has a reputation for wanting to shake up history for political purposes.

The Polish right has long been of the opinion that Poland's historical image is undeservedly bad internationally.

And with that it is not fundamentally wrong: In Germany, for example, historians agree that the fact that the Nazis not only murdered Polish Jews, but also non-Jewish Poles on a massive scale and systematically, is shockingly little known.

People in Poland are also rightly angry about the sloppy use of the phrase that someone was brought to a "Polish concentration camp" when it is meant that someone was deported to a German concentration camp on the soil of occupied Poland.

In Poland there was no quisling government set up by the Nazis to help with the murder of Jews.

The cooperation of Polish citizens took place on the lower level: when Poles blackmailed their Jewish neighbors, robbed them, abandoned them, betrayed them to the Germans - or even murdered them themselves, as in the July 1941 massacre in Jedwabne.

With the approval of the occupiers, the Jewish community was driven into a barn and burned.

A book about this crime had sparked a wild controversy in Poland as early as 2000, the extent of which continues to this day.

We also have to look the darker side of our history in the eye, some say.

The others don't like that.

In the eyes of the Polish right-wing nationalists, to which the "Fortress of the Good Name" belongs, history must be monumental, emphasize the heroic deeds or the sacrifices of the Poles.

Only then could history bring cohesion to the Poles.

The national conservative government tried to solve the problem by law around two years ago.

From then on, statements were to be punishable, which ascribed to Poland “contrary to the facts the responsibility or co-responsibility for crimes” “committed by the Third German Reich”.

This so-called "Holocaust Law" aroused protests among historians in Israel and the United States.

It could have been misused to suppress unpleasant research positions and was eventually defused.

Was Uncle Edward a Collaborator?

Whether Edward Malinowski, the plaintiff's uncle, was really a collaborator and betrayed Jews to the Germans is unlikely to be clear.

In 1950 a Polish court acquitted him of this charge.

A Jewish woman had also testified in his favor.

The witness later said that she wanted to save Malinowski from the death penalty and therefore fondled her memory.

Another person may have committed the crime.

Many in the village bore the surname Malinowski.

Whether Malinowski was a traitor or a savior - this does not change anything in the historical findings of the book, as historian Loose sees it: “There was betrayal, collaboration and cooperation with the Germans in numerous cases.

There is still a lot to be dealt with. «According to Engelking and Grabowski's work, around 140,000 Jews in the nine districts under investigation could initially have survived the phase of mass murders in 1942 - after the Holocaust and the war there were only 2500.

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