The government’s position is that any statement that connects the Polish state to Nazi murder is unpatriotic and defamatory. Even before the current memory wars commenced, the previous, pro-European Polish government objected to the use of the word “Polish” in connection with concentration and extermination camps; in 2012,
the White House apologized after President Barack Obama referred to a “Polish death camp.” In 2018, the government passed a law making it a criminal offense to ascribe blame for Nazi atrocities to Poles or Poland.
(Polish intellectuals often refer to this as the Gross Law, linking it to Gross’s book “Neighbors” and his other research.) The government also supports an extensive revisionist effort, which includes the lavishly funded Institute of National Remembrance, tasked with forging a history of Poland as a perennially victimized nation, and the Good Name Redoubt/Polish League Against Defamation, a non-governmental foundation closely allied with the Law and Justice Party. “
The machinery of the Polish state is engaged in the suppression of independent research,” Grabowski told me. State-employed researchers have been “looking at each and every footnote to see if we made a mistake” in “Night Without End,” he said. The book has more than thirty-five hundred footnotes.
The Good Name Redoubt conscripted Malinowski’s ailing niece, Filomena Leszczyńska, who is eighty-one, to bring the lawsuit. Leszczyńska demanded a published apology and a hundred thousand zlotys (about twenty-seven thousand dollars) in compensation for the alleged libel of her uncle. The Warsaw court sided with Leszczyńska, but it didn’t award her any damages. (This defamation-by-proxy approach has odd parallels in Russia.
At the same time as Grabowski and Engelking faced trial in Warsaw, the opposition politician Alexey Navalny was in a Moscow court, charged with insulting a veteran of the Second World War; the veteran is alive, but the lawsuit was brought by his nephew. In the Siberian city of Tomsk, a man who has been researching the circumstances of his great-grandfather’s execution during Stalin’s Great Terror has been accused of defamation, by the son of a deceased executioner.)
If a person whose name has supposedly been tarnished is long dead, the notion of defamation may seem absurd as a legal matter. But it represents the core of the memory wars: the current generation feels implicated in the crimes of its forebears, precisely because the ruling parties’ politics in both countries are the politics of the past.