Algemeiner Editor-in-Chief Dovid Efune appears on i24 News. Photo: Screenshot.

A recent court ruling in Poland against two scholars of the persecution of Polish Jews during World War II threatens to “stifle debate and study around the Holocaust,” said Algemeiner editor-in-chief Dovid Efune during an interview with i24 News on Wednesday. 

“Poland has to come to grips and recognize the full scope of the history — the good, the bad, and the ugly,” he said Wednesday. “And yes, there was a hell of a lot that is bad and ugly.”

The Tuesday decision said that historians Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski had to apologize to the plaintiff in the libel case, who had accused the two scholars of making false claims against her uncle in their 1,600-page study, “Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties in Occupied Poland.”

A passage in the book alleged that the man, Edward Malinowski, had assisted in the wartime killing of Jews in a forest in north-east Poland. His niece, Filomena Leszczynska, insisted he was a hero who saved Jews, and prevailed in a Warsaw court.

“The history of Poland during during the Holocaust is a mixed one, like it is with many countries,” Efune said, noting that over 6,000 Poles have been recorded as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. “But on the flip side, what’s not recognized and what they’re looking to stifle on an ongoing and continuous basis, is that there were 60,000 collaborators with the Nazis in the persecution of Jews that have been identified.”

“This is a real assault on freedom of speech and freedom of study, around perhaps the most important historical research that affects the Jewish community in the modern era,” he added.

Watch Efune’s i24 News appearance below: