A court in Warsaw ruled Tuesday that two prominent Holocaust researchers must apologize to a woman who claimed her deceased uncle had been slandered in a historical work, citing alleged inaccuracies that suggested the Polish man helped kill Jews during World War II. Lawyers for 81-year-old Filomena Leszczynska argued that the scholars had unfairly harmed her good name and that of her family, violating the honor of the uncle. The family says he saved Jews during the German occupation of Poland during World War II. The District Court in Warsaw did not, however, rule that they should be forced to pay her 100,000 zlotys ($27,000), as her lawyers had demanded. The case has been closely watched because it was expected to set a precedent in the field of Holocaust research. The ruling was not final, however, and Barbara Engelking, the author of the passage in question, said her side planned to appeal. At stake in the case was Polish national pride, according to the plaintiffs, and according to the defendants, the future independent research into an extremely sensitive issue. Judge Ewa Jonczyk ruled that the scholars, Engelking and Jan Grabowski, must make a written apology to Leszczynska for “providing inaccurate information” about her uncle, Edward Malinowski. He was described in a Holocaust survivor’s testimony saying he robbed her during the war and contributed to the death of 18 Jews hiding in a forest near the village of Malinowo. The judge stressed discrepancies in the testimony, given at different times, by the Jewish woman whose testimony was the basis of the description of Malinowski’s behavior. Malinowski was acquitted in a communist court in 1950 of being an accomplice to the 1943 killing by Germans of the group of Jews. He 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,” which was co-edited by Grabowski and Engelking. They researched and wrote parts of it, along with other researchers. Leszczynska has been backed by the Polish League Against Defamation, a group that fights harmful and untruthful depictions of Poland. 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 view the case as an attempt to discredit their overall findings and discourage other researchers from investigating the truth about Polish involvement in the German mass murder of Jews. Jewish rights organizations expressed dismay at the ruling, arguing that any mistakes in scholarly works should be left to other scholars to raise in a process of reviews and revisions. Mark Weitzman with the Wiesenthal Center said he feared it would have a “chilling effect” on scholars and “will open the door to other cases.” The judge rejected the demand for financial compensation, saying such an amount could have a negative effect on future scientific research. The plaintiffs’ lawyer, Monika Brzozowska-Pasieka, denied there was any attempt to stifle research or speech. She said Leszczynska had not decided whether to appeal but “compensation wasn’t the most important claim of this lawsuit for the plaintiff. The apology was and is of the greatest importance.” Poland was occupied by Nazi Germany during the war and its population subjected to mass murder […]
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