But before Grabowski could get started, a far-right Polish lawmaker with a record of antisemitic statements stormed the speaker’s podium, smashing the microphone, knocking over loudspeakers, and yanking cables, according to Notes from Poland, an independent local outlet.
Grzegorz Braun, of the Confederation party, later said he disrupted the event to defend Poland’s good name against Grabowski’s “historical propaganda.”.
Warsaw-born Grabowski, a professor at the University of Ottawa whose father was a Jewish Holocaust survivor, has been a vocal critic of Poland’s efforts to constrain discussion of the Holocaust there.
It became illegal in 2018 in Poland to accuse the country of complicity with Nazi crimes.
Grabowski recently published an academic study exposing the alleged distortion of Wikipedia articles on the Holocaust in Poland, leading to an unusual intervention by Wikipedia’s top authorities.
“Nothing like this has ever happened to me, I felt like [I was] in Poland in the 1930s,” Grabowski was quoted as saying following the incident at his lecture.
Outside the institute, participants encountered a protest of the lecture led by Robert Bąkiewicz, a prominent nationalist figure. »
