A Polish appellate court threw out a February ruling against two Holocaust scholars that said they needed to retract their research, claiming it defamed a Polish man by saying he was complicit in the murder of Jews during the Holocaust.
The appellate court ruling comes days after Poland passed a new law that sets a 30-year limit on restitution claims for property stolen by the Nazis during World War II and then seized by the Communist regime, which has led to a row between Israel and Poland.
The Warsaw District Court had previously ruled that Grabowski, a professor of history at the University of Ottawa in Canada, and Engelking, director of the Research Centre for the Extermination of Jews, had to issue a retraction of their work and apologize to the niece of Edward Malinowski, who was briefly mentioned in their book as being complicit in the murdering Jews during the Holocaust.
According to The Associated Press, Malinowski’s niece plans to appeal the decision to the Polish supreme court.