WARSAW, Poland (JTA) — The Warsaw prosecutor’s office has decided not to investigate an anti-Semitic letter directed at staff members of the Center for Holocaust Research.
In March, an anonymous person left the letter at the center’s door that called its historians “stupid dirty Jews” and “liars.” Barbara Engelking was described as a “lying jewess” and Jan Grabowski as “crazed with hatred of Poland and Poles.”
A printout of a study describing Jews as the perpetrators of their own persecution during World War II accompanied the letter.
The prosecutor’s office decided not to initiate an investigation into the “racial insulting of persons of Jewish nationality by person unknown” but did not provide any reasons for its decision.
Grabowski in response said the prosecutor “seems to march in lockstep with the spirit of times, at least with the spirit dominant in Poland today.”
Speaking of the anonymous letter writer, he said: “How did he know whether we were Jewish or not? Did he do the necessary racial investigation into the issue? What is the meaning of the term ‘Jewish nationality’ in Poland today? Is it opposed to ‘Polish nationality’? All of this is very, very interesting — and the prosecutor’s letter sheds more light on today’s Poland than the original anonymous letter.”
The Center for Holocaust Research publishes books describing the difficult Polish-Jewish history. This year, the center published “Night Without an End: The fate of Jews in selected counties of occupied Poland,” with research showing that Poles could have murdered tens of thousands of Jews after the liquidation of the ghettos by the Germans.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
