Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Poland won't sue author of book on Jews' treatment

The author of a book accusing Poles of persecuting Jews in the years immediately after the Holocaust will not face charges of slandering the Polish nation, prosecutors said on Tuesday.

Jan Gross's book "Fear", which claims that anti-Semitism remained prevalent in Poland under the communist regime after 1945, was published in Polish last week and immediately sparked a national debate about Polish-Jewish relations.

"The prosecutor's office decided there was nothing illegal (in the book)," said Boguslawa Marcinkowska, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office in the southern city of Krakow.

"Jan Gross presented his own vision of Polish-Jewish relations during war and communist times, choosing historical facts and giving his own interpretation of them," she added. The prosecutor checks controversial publications and decides whether they merit legal action.

Gross has already accused Poles of actively assisting the Nazis in persecuting Jews in World War Two.

Poland had the biggest Jewish population in Europe in 1939, but nearly all its Jews were among the six million who perished in the Holocaust. Survivors then fled communist anti-Semitic propaganda, leaving only a few thousand Jews in Poland.

In "Fear" Gross focuses on a 1946 pogrom in the southern city of Kielce, where the disappearance of an eight-year-old boy led to a bloody attack on the Jewish community.

Some Polish historians blame the pogrom on communist security forces, who they say encouraged the killing of some 40 people in Kielce, but the book revived controversy over what happened in Poland during both the Nazi and communist eras.

"This book revives unfinished business, it doesn't concentrate on what's going on now. It only says some Jewish Holocaust survivors were occasionally murdered by their neighbours," Piotr Kadlcik, the head of Poland's Jewish community, told Reuters.

"If we had discussed Poland's past openly after World War Two, people like Gross would not cause any tension. There were Poles who killed Jews, just as there were Poles who risked their lives to save them," he said. "This is obvious."

If convicted of slandering the Polish nation, Gross could have been jailed for up to three years.

Gross was not immediately available for comment, but in an interview with the daily Rzeczpospolita published on Jan. 11, he rejected charges his book was directed against Poland.

"I am convinced anti-Semitism was one of the main poisons that were injected into the Polish identity," he told the daily, holding nationalist and Catholic circles responsible.
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