WARSAW – A Warsaw court is due to deliver a verdict Tuesday in a closely watched libel case in which one side sees Polish national pride at stake and the other the future independence of Holocaust research.
Two prominent Polish scholars, Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski, are being sued by the 81-year-old niece of a wartime village elder who argues a book they co-edited defames her deceased uncle's memory by suggesting he had a role in the death of Jews.
The uncle is mentioned in a brief passage of a 1,600-page historical work, "Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland.” The woman, Filomena Leszczynska, is backed by the Polish League Against Defamation, a group that fights harmful and untruthful