Barbara Engelking
On Estera Siemiatycka, sołtys Edward Malinowski, and lawsuits
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Act III: Trial of 2019-2021
The fate of Jews from the Bielsk county who survived the German occupation outside the county was a sidenote to my text, as I focused on those who survived the war on its territory. That is why I devoted only three sentences to Estera Siemiatycka story, since she survived the war outside of Bielsk county (doing forced labor). I wrote:
After the loss of her family, Estera Drogicka (nee Siemiatycka), equipped with documents bought from a Byelorussian woman, decided to go to Prussia to work. Edward Malinowski, sołtys of Malinowo, helped her (robbing her in the process) and in December 1942 she went to in Rastenburg (Kętrzyn), where she worked as a domestic help for the German family named Fittkau. Not only did she meet her second husband there (a Pole who was also a laborer), she also started a trading operation, and sent Malinowski parcels with various things to sell. She visited him when she went “home” on leave. She realized that he was an accomplice in the deaths of several dozen Jews who had been hiding in the woods and had been turned over to the Germans, yet she gave false testimony in his defense at his trial after the war.
I based the cited fragment of the text primarily on the testimony that Estera Siemiatycka gave for the Shoah Foundation in 1996, when she already had temporal and emotional to the matters in question, in which she told in detail how she survived the war and referred to her own testimony in the trial of sołtys Malinowski. It was this source that I found most reliable for reconstructing the story of Estera Siemiatycka (Maria Wiśniewska, Maria Wiltgren). The book with the above paragraph was published in April 2018.
On June 17, 2019, I was sued (together with the co-editor of the book, Jan Grabowski) by the niece of the late sołtys Edward Malinowski, Filomena Leszczyńska, for violation of her personal rights. She demanded that we pay her 100,000 PLN and publish an apology in several newspapers. The lawsuit is supported by the Reduta Dobrego Imienia Foundation, which “not only supports Filomena Leszczyńska nominally, but also financially, i.e. by bearing the costs of the lawsuit (lawyer’s and court’s fees, administrative costs, costs of experts’ and historians’ opinions).” The allegations boil down to the fact that in the book I confused the two Edward Malinowskis, attributing the trade with Estera to sołtys (while it was another Edward Malinowski, son of Adolf, that traded with her), and I attributed denouncing the Jews to sołtys Edward Malinowski, despite the fact that he was acquitted at the 1950 trial.
During the subsequent hearings, the court heard that testimony of Maciej Świrski, chairman of the Reduta Dobrego Imienia (RDI) Foundation (he spoke of Mrs. Filomena Leszczyńska's suffering caused by the alleged defamation); Estera Siemiatycka’s sons – Zbigniew and Roman Wiltgren (who came specially from Australia and Sweden and confirmed that their mother thought that sołtys Malinowski was a bad man); Filomena Leszczyńska (who does not follow the trial and does not know Estera’s testimony; she only knows that her uncle saved a Jewish woman during the occupation, sending her to work in Prussia) and the defendants. The defendants attempted to bring the case back into proportion and convince the court that the allegations were unfounded. First of all, they stressed that the author of the paragraph in question did not express her own opinion about sołtys Malinowski and his participation in the manhunt for Jews, but only reported what Estera Siemiatycka had said about him. The paragraph does indeed contain an error, namely, the attribution of trading with Estera to sołtys Malinowski, but this in no way violates the personal rights of Edward Malinowski or his niece. Such a mistake is irrelevant from the perspective of the claims asserted by the complainant in the court proceedings in question. Nor was it, as the articles in the right-wing press and RDI suggest, a deliberate distortion of sołtys Malinowski’s biography. In the realm of research, such errors are reported at most in reviews or in subsequent publications, and if the book has another addition, an appropriate amendment is made.
The lawsuit, de facto brought by Reduta Dobrego Imienia against the author and the editor of the book Dalej jest noc, is a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP). Lawsuits of such type aim, above all, to undermine the credibility and competence of the people sued, to burden them financially (with high penalties and legal costs), and to provoke a “chilling effect”, i.e. – in this case – to discourage other researchers from investigating and writing the truth about the extermination of Jews in Poland.
The lawsuit may turn out to be precedent-setting also for another reason: there are demands from attorneys representing Ms. Leszczyńska (and de facto from Reduta Dobrego Imienia) to protect “national identity and pride,” pointing to it as a new kind of protection of personal rights. It is an enormous threat to freedom of speech. Until now, it was indisputable that the violation of personal rights has an individualized character, i.e. the complainant must demonstrate that they were offended, for example, as a specific person and not as a member of some group affected by the statement. The concept of personal good such as “national identity and pride,” which has been forcibly advocated for several years, is a complete departure from such model and leads to the situation when anyone who feels Polish might sue anyone who expresses a critical opinion about the Polish Nation, and perhaps even the Polish State. In particular, it may concern the expression of historical assessments, thus threatening a kind of censorship and self-censorship of researchers. In the discussed case, the complainant (inspired by the Reduta Dobrego Name) goes even further, namely she links the violation of her personal rights not to the fact that she is Polish or that the Polish Nation was offended, but to the fact that her uncle was a Pole and therefore, if he is accused of some malicious deed, it is as if the pride of the whole Nation (and thus of the complainant) was hurt. If acknowledged, such reasoning, obviously illogical, poses an extraordinary threat to freedom of speech and freedom of scholarly research.
Translation: Kaja Gucio
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Powiat bielski [in:] Dalej jest noc pp. 149-150; in the book I provided the following footnote: AIPN Bi, 403/18, AIPN Bi, 403/18, Akta sprawy karnej Edwarda Malinowskiego, Zeznanie Marii Wiśniewskiej: “during the German occupation I was hiding as a Jew in the forest near Malinowo. Nobody wanted to take me in. So I went to sołtys Malinowski, and he took me in. For a good few weeks I hid in Malinowski’s barn and he fed me […]. At night his barn was full of Jews, Malinowski gave them food. I owe Malinowski my life, because he had Aryan papers made for me, and then, upon my request, reported that I was evading forced labor. I was then arrested and sent back to Germany. I used to visit Malinowo on my leave. At the time of the murder of the Jews, I was in Germany. I only received a letter from Edward Malinowski, son of Adolf, in which he wrote me that a forester had delivered the Jews into German hands and that the Jewish partisans had killed him for that.” Malinowski was acquitted.