Polish government to “analyse” 1,000 academics who signed letter supporting Holocaust scholar

Poland’s education minister has said his department will investigate academics who have signed a letter in defence of a Holocaust scholar who has been criticised by the Polish government for saying that Poles did little to help Jews during the war.

“I saw the names,” said Przemysław Czarnek. “We will analyse which universities [they are from] and we will react.”

So far, over 1,000 academics, based in Poland and abroad, have put their name to the letter expressing “opposition to the political attack on Prof. Barbara Engelking”, who is director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) in Warsaw.

The signatories note that Czarnek has threatened to end state funding for academic institutions that “employ people who slander Poles”. This, says the letter, “stands in direct opposition to freedom of academic research guaranteed by the constitution of Poland”.

Czarnek, whose brief covers schools, universities and research, was asked about the letter yesterday during an interview with state broadcaster Polskie Radio.

After saying that his ministry would look into the signatories, he repeated his pledge to “review funding” for institutions that employ scholars who “slander Poles”.

“There is no consent for financing anti-Polish rubbish from Polish money,” he said. “The letter is allegedly in defence of scholarship, but this has nothing to with scholarship. It is simply defamation of the Polish nation and the good name of Poland by a woman who has no scientific basis for the claims she presented.”

His earlier threats appeared to be borne out at the end of last month, when Czarnek’s ministry announced increased state subsidies to cover salaries at all but two of the 69 institutes which make up PAN, which is Poland’s main state-funded research body.

Among the two that did not receive the subsidies was the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, which employs Engelking. The director of the institute, Andrzej Rychard, told TVN24 that the decision shows “the minister is unfortunately already implementing his financial threats”.

“[This is] an attempt by the authorities to censor free academic research,” argued Rychard. “It starts with research on the Holocaust of the Jews, but it can cover many different difficult topics: refugees, migration, gender.”

The controversy began last month when, on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Engelking told TVN that “Jews were unbelievably disappointed with Poles during the war”. She said that “very few” Poles helped Jews and noted that there was “widespread blackmailing” of Jews by Poles.

Her remarks were widely criticised by conservative politicians and commentators, including Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who called them part of an “anti-Polish narrative” that has “nothing to do with reliable historical knowledge”.

He and others noted that more Poles have been recognised by Israel for helping Jews during the war than any other national group and that Poland’s government-in-exile and underground resistance made efforts to help Jews.

However, a number of leading research institutions in Israel and Poland have supported Engelking, arguing that, while some Poles did help Jews, this was the exception rather than the norm.

Main image credit: MEiN (under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 PL)

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.