A history professor at Princeton University may face criminal charges in his native Poland over the publication there of his latest book, in which he details “how Poles victimized Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in the aftermath of World War II,” I>The Washington Post reported today.

The professor, Jan T. Gross, arrived in Poland this week for a publicity tour for the book, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz, which was published last year to wide acclaim in the United States. He is also the author of Neighbors (2001), a book about a 1941 massacre of 1,600 Jews in Jedwabne, Poland, by the town’s non-Jewish residents.

Under a 2006 law, which Mr. Gross and other historians contend Poland enacted partly in response to the American publication of Fear, “asserting that ‘the Polish nation’ was complicit in crimes or atrocities committed by Nazis or communists” is a crime punishable by up to three years in prison, according to the Post.

The archbishop of Kraków has written to the book’s Polish publisher, which has close ties to the Roman Catholic Church, saying that reading Fear was painful for him and that it was not the publisher’s role to “awake anti-Polish and anti-Semitic demons,” the Polskie Radio reported.

Even historians critical of the authorities for considering legal action against Mr. Gross have assailed the Princeton professor, himself a Polish Jew who immigrated to the United States in the 1960s, accusing him of inflaming feelings about an era that remains emotionally fraught. In an interview with the Post, Mr. Gross said he was unmoved by the controversy and did not think he would face criminal charges. —Aisha Labi