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University of Ottawa professor wins appeal in Holocaust case testing academic freedom

The appeals court overturned a lower-court decision that Jan Grabowski and co-editor Barbara Engelking apologize for damaging the reputation of a village mayor in a 2018 book.

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A University of Ottawa professor need not apologize for published research into the Holocaust that painted a war-time mayor in Poland as a possible Nazi collaborator, an appeals court has ruled.

The court overturned a lower-court decision that uOttawa history professor Jan Grabowski and scholar Barbara Engelking apologize for damaging the reputation of the village mayor, Edward Malinowski, in a co-edited 2018 book, Night without end: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland.

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The lawsuit was originally brought by one of Malinowski’s relatives, supported by various groups in Poland.

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The lower-court ruling was seen as an attack on academic freedom and, according to Grabowksi, had thrown a chill over research into the role that individual collaborators played in betraying Jews to the Nazis.

He said this week the appeal decision gave him “great joy” and satisfaction “all the more that this decision has a direct impact on all Polish scholars, and especially on historians of the Holocaust.”

The lower court ruling found that Malinowski’s “honour had been violated” because the book portrayed him as having denounced a group of Polish Jews to the Nazis.

However, the Warsaw appeals court judge dismissed the claims, citing the importance of freedom of academic research and the need to avoid a chilling effect on today’s historians.

“This is of particular importance in matters that constitute an important element of public debate, raising important social issues regarding the history of a given state and nation,” the judge said, according to a Reuters report.

Grabowski, the son of a Holocaust survivor, spoke of how he was villainized in the right-wing Polish media and portrayed as unpatriotic.

Poland’s Jewish population of 3.2 million was the largest in Europe at the start of the Second World War. Almost all were killed during the war, many of them in death camps, and a further three million non-Jewish citizens also died under Poland’s Nazi occupation.

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