MALINOWO, Poland – From a forest on the edge of this small village in eastern Poland, a distant and almost overlooked local horror is reverberating widely. He threw a shroud over the 30 villagers who live nearby, reached a court in Warsaw and now radiates anguish around the world with the rewrite of the history of the Holocaust.
The case has its roots in the Nazi occupation of Poland during World War II, when terrified Jews took shelter in the forest and, according to a survivor quoted in a recent Polish study on the Holocaust, were murdered there after the mayor of Malinowo, a Pole, told the Nazis about his hiding place.
This horror, however, has now resurfaced, revived by a defamation suit against two scholars who edited the study and who are accused of tarnishing the honor of the long-dead mayor and the Polish nation. A verdict in the case, which was presented by the mayor’s elderly niece with the support of organs financed in part by the Polish government, is expected on Tuesday.
The targets of the libel action are Jan Grabowski, a professor of Polish-Canadian history at the University of Ottawa, and Barbara Engelking, a historian at the Polish Holocaust Research Center. Together, they edited “Night Without End,” a 1,700-page 2018 study of the role that individual Poles played in helping Nazi murder.
“In a normal world, this case would have been closed a long time ago,” said Professor Grabowski in an interview. “But Poland can no longer be considered a normal democracy,” he added, accusing the Law and Justice Party of initiating a “reconquest of history” by focusing on Poland’s own suffering during the war and minimizing its complicity in crimes Nazis against Jews.
The Polish government denies any involvement in the defamation case. But it helped to make this possible by amending the law in 2020 to waive court fees for all cases related to “the Polish Nation’s struggle against Nazism and Communism”.
In a sign that the defamation suit is not an isolated incident, police in eastern Poland recently called on the publisher of an online website about Jewish life to ask why she had “insulted the Polish nation” by writing that “the Polish participation in Shoah is a historical fact. ”
Before being invaded in 1939 by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Poland had the largest Jewish population in Europe. As the war spread and Hitler turned against his former Soviet ally, the conquered Polish lands became the focus of the Nazis’ Final Solution, with about three million Jews – half the total death toll across Europe – murdered in Poland, mainly in extermination camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka.
But Poland has never installed a collaborationist government and is proud of its record of fierce resistance to the Nazis.
This pride, however, has acquired an aggressive and intolerant advantage since the Law and Justice Party came to power in 2015. It sought to criminalize any questioning of Polish heroism during the war and poured money into research groups and museum projects that they present Poland as the eternal and an entirely innocent victim, a “Christ of the Nations” repeatedly crucified by foreign powers.
Walentyna Golaszewska, a 64-year-old resident of Malinowo, said she grew up hearing stories about how her grandparents brought food to Jews hiding in the forest. She was shocked to learn that then-mayor Edward Malinowski has now been accused of helping with the murder.
“I thought this whole thing would have gone away with my grandfather’s generation. It all happened more than 70 years ago and now everyone is dead. None of us can really know the truth, ”she said.
She recently commissioned a copy of the study co-edited by Professor Grabowski because she wanted to learn more about events obscured for so many years by family legends and village gossip.
“It is very difficult to explain why one person helps and another kills,” she said.
Also difficult to explain, she added, is why the wartime mayor’s niece, Filomena Leszczynska, decided to sue Professor Grabowski and Mrs. Engelking for defamation and damages of about $ 27,000.
The niece, who is almost blind and lives on the outskirts of a village near her family’s farm, declined to be interviewed. A young relative said he was too sick to speak.
Professor Grabowski and his supporters believe the case originated in nationalist groups close to the government, such as the Polish League Against Defamation, which receives state funding.
In a telephone interview, Maciej Swirski, head of the League Against Defamation, denied having acted on behalf of the state or the Law and Justice Party. But he acknowledged that he helped start the defamation case. He said he had traveled to Malinowo and told Leszczynska that he had found errors in the book, proving that his uncle was defamed.
Swirski said his organization raised money from private donors to pay Leszczynska’s lawyers and finance their lawsuit.
The defamation complaint alleges that scholars maliciously accused the wartime mayor as a murderer when he “hid Jews and did so in an absolutely altruistic way”. Her niece, says the complaint, was “very hurt” and wanted to keep “the memory of her heroic uncle” alive.
Critics of the action see this as a struggle to silence independent historical studies. Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and research center, denounced it as “a serious attack on free and open research”, saying it was “unacceptable” to set limits on academic study “through judicial or political pressure”.
Professor Grabowski acknowledged that the study was wrong in merging the stories of two former Malinowo mayors who shared the same name, Edward Malinowski. But, he said, that mistake put Leszczynska’s uncle in a better position, because he attributed acts of kindness to the Jews by his younger namesake.
In 2012, shortly before his death, young Edward Malinowski was invited by Jewish groups to participate in a ceremony in the forest of Malinowo, inaugurating a stone memorial decorated with a star of David.
“The war ended 75 years ago, but it still lives in our bones. It will last forever, ”recalled Malinowski’s son, Zygmunt, on Saturday, during a visit to the memorial.
Poland, he said, must recognize that it was not only the Nazis who killed the Jews. But in eastern Poland, “the Poles suffered no less than the Jews,” he said.
The defamation case received ample favorable coverage from media controlled by the Law and Justice party and the book at the center of the case was denounced by the National Memory Institute, a state agency that led efforts to keep history on a narrow, patriotic path. . The institute has powers of attorney to enforce what has been an official mission since 2018 that includes “protecting the reputation of the Republic of Poland and the Polish Nation”.
That Poles suffered terribly under Nazi occupation and sometimes helped Jews is an established fact, said David Silberklang, a senior historian at Yad Vashem in Israel.
“No scholar with credentials would say that Poland was bad, that Poland was completely indifferent to the fate of the Jews,” said Silberklang in a telephone interview. “It was clearly a very complex situation.”
Of the 27,712 people classified by Yad Vashem as Righteous among Nations – non-Jews who took great risks to save Jews during the Holocaust – more than 7,000 are Poles, far more than any other country.
Polish heroism, however, coexisted with acts of violence that were sometimes monstrous, a fact that the Law and Justice Party and nationalist groups struggled to hide. In one episode in July 1941, villagers in Jedwabne, northeast of Warsaw, locked more than 300 Jews, neighbors with whom they had lived peacefully, in a barn and set it on fire, killing them all.
The government caused international outrage in 2018 by introducing legislation that would make it a crime to accuse the Polish nation of complicity in the Holocaust. The law was amended to replace criminal penalties with less severe civil sanctions.
The defamation case against Professor Grabowski and Engelking, however, has raised concerns that, instead of backing down in an attempt to impose a patriotic and wartless version of the story, the government and its allies are now going on the offensive.
“There is a coordinated campaign going on to change history in a way that is comfortable for the government,” said Silberklang, a historian at Yad Vashem.
Malinowo’s current mayor, Grzegorz Zaremba, a dairy farmer, said he learned of the furor over the deaths last month.
“Suddenly, everyone was talking about our little village,” said Zaremba, “but nobody really knows the truth about what happened here. Those who do are all dead. “
Anatol Magdziarz contributed reporting from Warsaw.