A Warsaw court is due to deliver a verdict on Tuesday in a closely watched libel case in which one side sees Polish national pride at stake and the other the future independence of Holocaust research.
Two prominent Polish scholars, Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski, are being sued by the 81-year-old niece of a wartime village elder who argues a book they co-edited defames her deceased uncle’s memory by suggesting he had a role in the death of Jews.
The uncle is mentioned in a brief passage of a 1,600-page historical work, “Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland.”
The woman, Filomena Leszczynska, is backed by the Polish League Against Defamation, a group that fights harmful and untruthful depictions of Poland.
It argues the woman’s uncle, Edward Malinowski, was a hero who helped save Jews during World War II and accuses the scholars of research errors that resulted in Malinowski appearing as someone who betrayed Jews to the Germans.
Malinowski was acquitted in 1950 of being an accomplice to the killing by Germans of 18 Jews in a forest near the village of Malinowo in 1943.
The anti-defamation group says the authors slandered an innocent man and deprived the niece of her rights, including the right to pride and national identity. The plaintiffs are suing Grabowski and Engelking for 100,000 zlotys ($27,000) in damages and a published apology.
Grabowski, a Polish-Canadian history professor at the University of Ottawa, and Engelking, founder and director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw, are among Poland’s most prominent Holocaust researchers. They were among several who researched and wrote parts of the two-volume work.