In January 2018, the Polish parliament adopted the 2018 Amendment to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance, which criminalized public speech claiming that the Polish state was responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich. [1] The controversial act details that such claims “grossly diminish the responsibility of the true perpetrators of said crimes” and render individuals liable to a fine or three-year prison sentence. [2] Although the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance was established in 1998 to prevent Holocaust denialism, an undeniably positive aspiration, the 2018 amendment has resulted in the Act becoming a coercive mechanism for distorting and censoring national history. [3] On February 8, 2021, two Polish historians, Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking, were convicted of violating Article 55a of the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance (2018) in their novel Dalej jest noc [Night without End] for having accused Edward Malinowski, the mayor of the Polish village Malinowo during the Second World War, of abetting the Nazis. [4] Though the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance sought to protect Holocaust remembrance and demystify Poland’s ambiguous role under the Third Reich, the proceedings of the subsequent case—Leszczyńska v. Engelking and Grabowski (2021)—reveal the inherent threat memory laws pose to historical scholarship.

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