Court reinstates historian fired from state body over involvement in website critical of its president

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A court has ordered the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), a state body, to reinstate one of its historians who was fired after launching a website that published texts critical of the IPN and its head, Karol Nawrocki, who is now a leading candidate in this year’s presidential election.

“The labour court reinstated Dr [Sławomir] Poleszak to his job, stating that all the steps taken by the employer, together with the previous actions in which he was harassed and which culminated in [his employment] being terminated, were improper actions,” his lawyer, Rafał Choroszyński, told the Gazeta Wyborcza daily.

The IPN and Nawrocki – who is the presidential candidate of Poland’s main conservative opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party and is currently running second in the polls – have not yet commented on the ruling.

Poleszak had worked for nearly 21 years at the IPN, an institution tasked with researching, documenting and in some cases prosecuting Nazi and communist crimes, as well as educating about those periods.

In 2017, he was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, Poland’s second-highest civilian award, by PiS-aligned President Andrzej Duda.

In 2018, he and a group of historians from Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, the Catholic University of Lublin (KUL) and the IPN launched a website called Ohistorie (meaning “about history”).

Poleszak claims that from the website’s inception until the autumn of 2021, he was not once informed that combining it with his work at the IPN would be a problem, reports Gazeta Wyborcza.

That reportedly changed in October 2021, after Nawrocki replaced the previous director of the IPN’s branch in Lublin, where Poleszak worked, with Mateusz Kotecki, a colleague whom Nawrocki had known since his time in high school and who had previously run for office as a PiS candidate.

Kotecki reportedly questioned Poleszak about why he had not sought permission from the IPN president to run the website. “I explained that it was voluntary, outside of working hours, and unpaid,” Poleszak recalled.

Despite this, he received a formal warning then later was informed that the IPN president did not approve of his role with the website. The next morning, he resigned as editor-in-chief, but hours later he received his termination notice.

In a 2021 interview with Gazeta Wyborcza, Poleszak stated that his termination letter cited a “loss of confidence” by the IPN management, due to his editorial role at Ohistorie.

“The justification given was that, without the consent of the IPN president, I ran an online historical website. The second allegation was that materials critical of the IPN and its representatives were published there,” he said.

The third complaint reportedly referenced in Poleszak’s dismissal notice concerned an article he had written about Józef Franczak, an officer in Poland’s wartime Home Army (AK) and later one of the so-called “cursed soldiers” who resisted the postwar imposition of communism.

Such figures were a prominent part of the PiS government’s historical narrative about Polish heroism during and after the war. But Poleszak’s research, published in 2020, suggested that Franczak had been involved in a shootout with Jewish partisans, two of whom died, and had handed over another Jew to the Germans.

In response to Poleszak’s dismissal, the editorial staff at Ohistorie issued a statement saying that “the actions of IPN President Nawrocki bear the hallmarks of a political purge and as such are unacceptable”. They accused Nawrocki of “not accepting the values underlying academic life and democratic society”.

Poleszak filed three lawsuits against the IPN, challenging his disciplinary penalty, arguing that IPN approval for his work on Ohistorie was unnecessary, and seeking reinstatement.

A labour court in Lublin ruled in his favour in May 2024 on all three counts and that decision has now been upheld in a final, binding decision. “Therefore, [Poleszak’s] legal status should be restored as if [he] was [still] an employee of the IPN,” Choroszyński, his lawyer, told Gazeta Wyborcza.

“This is a symbolic verdict for me,” Poleszak told TOK FM after the first ruling last year. “It shows that historians should stand by objective truth, even when facing pressure.”

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: Lowdown/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY-SA 3.0)

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.