Dver the past twenty years, a new historical school on the Holocaust has been born in Poland, which has taken as its object, among other things, the study of the relations of the non-Jewish Polish population with the Jews persecuted by the Germans. Researchers from this school have created a center, the Center for Research on the Shoah, directed by Professor Barbara Engelking, located at the Academy of Sciences of Poland, the highest scientific body in this country.
The production of this team is remarkable: in twenty years, they have published dozens of books (some of which have been translated into French), they have created an international-level journal and their work is recognized by the highest scientific authorities in the world. entire. But, since the advent of the nationalist government in 2015, this research center has continued to be attacked by the Polish authorities, who want to promote an exclusively heroic image of Poland.
Already in 2019, in Paris, a conference, supported by the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah and a number of other university partners, organized to defend our colleagues and publicize their work to the French public, had been disrupted by Polish anti-Semitic groups. The Minister of Higher Education at the time, Frédérique Vidal, was moved and surprised by this with her Polish counterpart. On Polish public television, the heads of our colleagues were shown in effigy, they were denounced as traitors “Anti-Polish”.
Recently, during a program on TVN, the first private channel in Poland, devoted to the 80e anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Barbara Engelking, when asked about the behavior of the Polish population during the uprising, reported that the imprisoned Jews expected more help from the Polish side and that the lack of support underlined their great loneliness. His words, however measured, caused an outcry from the government side.
Threats from another age
The Prime Minister, the Minister for National Education and other actors in this camp are planning no more and no less than to impose in the public space a “historical politics” patriotic that would leave no room for critical research. They foresee the possibility of professional and financial sanctions against Barbara Engelking and her centre. The Polish Minister of National Education, Przemyslaw Czarnek, uttered this sentence which, by equating historical criticism with insult, calls into question the freedom of expression: “I will review my financial decisions because I will not finance on a larger scale an institute which maintains this kind of individuals who simply insult the Poles. »
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