U of O prof fears Polish ruling will stifle research
A University of Ottawa history professor says he's deeply concerned about the chilling effect a Polish court ruling could have on Holocaust scholarship like his that seeks to explore the role of individual Polish collaborators.
In a telephone interview from Poland on Wednesday, Prof. Jan Grabowski said the ruling, which demands an apology for “inaccurate information” published in a 2018 book he helped edit, has unleashed a frightening backlash.
“I have tremendous, tremendous concerns,” Grabowski said. “I am a senior, tenured professor at the University of Ottawa, and I am in a very delicate situation. I am feeling an extraordinary amount of pressure in Poland now ….
“In my case, it's unpleasant. But imagine you are a 25-year-old graduate student of history. Do you think you're going to embark upon discovery of difficult history? I don't think so.”
Grabowski travelled to Poland earlier this year to face the court decision, which many considered an important test of academic freedom.
In the ruling, a Polish judge ordered Grabowski and another Holocaust scholar, Prof. Barbara Engelking, to apologize for defaming Edward Malinowski by suggesting the wartime mayor had denounced a group of Jews to the Nazis. The judge said the scholars “violated Malinowski's honour,” but stopped short of making a financial award.
The lawsuit was brought by one of Malinowski's surviving relatives and supported by the Polish League Against Defamation, which seeks to “defend Poland's good name.”
Grabowski has vowed to appeal the ruling.
“There are very many people in Poland for whom what I do is wrong, it's unpatriotic,” said Grabowski, whose father, Zbigniew, was a Holocaust survivor and Polish resistance fighter who took part in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.
“There's a wave of hate you cannot even imagine, with my face being plastered on the covers of mass-circulation, right-wing newspapers.”
The passage at issue in the court case was drawn from a book co-edited by Grabowski and Engelking titled Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties in Occupied Poland. Engelking wrote that Malinowski had betrayed a group of Jews to the Germans, according to a Jewish survivor whom Malinowski had helped to protect. In 1950, a Polish court cleared him of collaborating with the Germans.
“In her capacity as a scholar of the Holocaust, she (Engelking) chose to believe the Jewish survivor and witness,” Grabowski said.
In the decision released Tuesday, Grabowski said, the Polish court decided “a historian has no right to make a judgment like that.”
“This is my deepest worry about this whole verdict,” he added. “It basically tells historians that Jewish testimony from the Holocaust should not be assigned such value as we tend to assign it.”
Academics and human rights groups defended the Holocaust scholars. The University of Ottawa offered “unwavering support” for Grabowski. U of O president Jacques Frémont said Grabowski's examination of the fate of Polish Jews during the war “shows how knowledge of the past remains vitally relevant today.
“The impact his work has had in Poland, and the censorious reaction it has generated, demonstrates this truth.”
The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies said the ruling could have a devastating impact on Holocaust
research and education. Mark Weitzman, the centre's director of government affairs, said the ruling “is clearly meant to whitewash unfortunate aspects of Polish history and to offer protection for anti-Semites.” He said it opens the door to renewed attempts to intimidate Holocaust scholars.
For years, Grabowski has attracted fierce criticism from Polish nationalists, led by the Polish League Against Defamation. The group gained money and influence after the nationalist Law and Justice party formed a majority government in Poland in 2015.
Nationalists believe that highlighting the complicity of individual Poles in the killing of Jews does a disservice to the country's gallant wartime history and the enormous suffering of its people.
Six million Poles, including at least three million Jews, died during the Nazi occupation.
Grabowski was hired at the U of O in 1993 as a colonial historian of New France, but his career took a dramatic turn eight or nine years later when he visited the Polish archives and discovered a large cache of German wartime records that offered new revelations about the Jewish experience in Poland. For the past two decades, he has been a Holocaust scholar.
His 2014 book, Hunt for Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland, won the Yad Vashem International Book Prize.
Ottawa's Medical Officer of Health says she doesn't have “a fixed position” on the question of cancelling or deferring March Break.
Ontario reportedly is preparing to push the break until later in the year over concerns about COVID-19 and the more contagious U.K. variant. An announcement from the education minister is expected this week.
`What I'm very focused on is that what we need to mitigate social gatherings of children, with children from other households, outside of school,” Dr. Vera Etches said Wednesday.
She pointed out that schools had layers of protection in place, such as symptom screening, masks, distancing and cohorts.
“In the home environment … there's that relaxation of distance, there's no masks, and that's where we see COVID being transmitted. So we have to just be careful when we have more time to socialize, that we still choose those activities that are less of a risk for COVID transmission, by being outside, limiting that close contact with others.”
Across the city, the number of active cases was at 402, continuing a downward trend since mid-January. However, a new outbreak was reported at Charles H. Hulse Public School. According to OPH data, it involved three student cases. There are now seven ongoing outbreaks in local schools or childcare facilities.
Meanwhile, by the end of Wednesday, eligible residents in all 37 Ottawa retirement homes deemed “high-risk” were expected to have received their first COVID-19 vaccine dose. Of 84 designated retirement homes in the city, OPH identified 37 as highrisk, excluding one home that was offered first-dose vaccinations earlier because of vaccine availability and health concerns at that home. First injections for the high-risk homes began Feb. 7.
Completing these shots in four days, said a memo to city council, is an achievement that “speaks both to our enhanced efficiency from experience in the (long-term care homes) and, importantly, increased collaboration as part of our plan with additional local health care partners.”
Paramedics, community doctors, the Queensway Carleton Hospital and The Ottawa Hospital, retirement home medical staff, and Ottawa Public Health all participated in vaccine administration at the retirement homes.
The timeline for completing first-dose vaccinations in the remaining 47 retirement homes depends on vaccine supply, the memo added.
Second-dose vaccinations for long-term care workers and essential caregivers as well as higher-risk health-care workers vaccinated at the TOH clinic are ongoing.