Deletions From Book on Pope Add Up to Court Battle

WARSAW — While most Poles are absorbed this week in the homecoming of Pope John Paul II, a papal drama of a different sort will play out in a courtroom on Solidarity Avenue here in the Polish capital.

Lawyers for the American and Polish publishers of the best-selling book “His Holiness” are expected to square off in court over claims that the newly released Polish version of the papal biography was doctored to avoid offending Roman Catholics in Poland--and, most notably, the former Cardinal Karol Wojtyla himself.

At least four pages of unflattering references to the pope’s health, leading Polish clerics and alleged anti-Semitism in the church were deleted from the Polish translation by Amber Publishing. The Warsaw company owns the Polish rights to the hard-hitting book by Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi that was published last year in the United States by Doubleday.

“There is probably a different way of thinking for Americans and Poles,” said Eva Malacina, Amber’s foreign rights manager. “Some of the sentences were really unpleasant for us. But to remove them does not discredit the whole book.”

When Doubleday and the two authors protested in April, Amber reluctantly added an appendix to the book--which had been printed but not yet distributed to bookstores--that lists 34 deleted phrases, sentences and paragraphs and the pages they came from.

But in a lawsuit filed in Warsaw last week, Doubleday and the authors allege that far more of the book was altered--perhaps twice the instances acknowledged by Amber--and they demand that all 15,000 copies be recalled and destroyed.

The New York publishers also insist that the appendix was an inappropriate remedy, particularly because it is buried behind the notes and describes the passages as “drastic, undocumented or overly subjective judgments and hypotheses” made by the authors.

“I have been in publishing for 40 years, and I have never seen anything of this nature before,” said Eric Major, Doubleday’s editor of the book, which has been translated into five other languages. “To me, this isn’t the book that they bought. It is a book that should now be written by Marco Politi, Carl Bernstein and Amber Publishing.”

Maria Strarz-Kanska, an independent agent who represents Doubleday in Poland, said Amber’s handiwork smacks of Communist-era censorship. She said the removal of controversial references to Polish history, particularly those regarding Jewish-Polish relations, does a gross disservice to readers.

“Polish history after World War II was one big lie as it was taught in the schools,” said Strarz-Kanska, who worked for 15 years in publishing under communism. “There is still a lot to be explained to people, to be openly discussed. How can we tolerate having one group of people tell another group what to read or not?”

Malacina rejected any comparison to Communist-style censorship, saying that publishers often have disagreements with authors and that, in the end, Amber honored the writers’ wish not to cut the book. She denied that deletions were made beyond the 34 noted in the appendix; any additional discrepancies, she said, were due to translation. She also said Amber feared that several remarks about Polish church officials could expose the company to legal action.

“It is a very interesting book, and well written,” Malacina said. “But there is always some fly in the ointment.”

Passages were removed from sections dealing with the Auschwitz concentration camp, the Polish church’s lack of faith in the Solidarity trade union movement and troubled relations between the pope and the Polish primate, Cardinal Jozef Glemp.

With release of the book timed to coincide with the pontiff’s pilgrimage, which began Saturday in rainy Wroclaw, Malacina said editors were particularly sensitive to passages describing his failing health in “rather brutal” terms. One of the deleted paragraphs refers to the pope losing “the thread of conversation” and observes that the pontiff, “famous for his mastery of languages, occasionally has a hard time recalling the simplest Italian words.”