Holocaust Historians on Trial in Poland. What is at Stake? In discussion with Dr. Jan Grabowski and Dr. Natalia Aleksiun

A month ago, a Warsaw court ruled that two distinguished historians Professors Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski tarnished the memory of a Polish villager in a book that examined the experience of Jewish victims. The trial is part of a long campaign in which Holocaust research that did not fit with the idealized version of the history of the German occupation of Poland has been condemned. The campaign and in particular the trial could have a lasting effect deterring impartial research into Poles’ actions during World War Two and discouraging educators from raising uncomfortable questions.

Join us as we welcome Historians Dr. Jan Grabowski and Dr. Natalia Aleksiun in a timely discussion of that deeply troubling court ruling out of Warsaw regarding the publication “Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland”. The continued research and study of the events of the Holocaust by scholars, students and the world is the only protection we have from allowing these atrocities to ever take place again. We will discuss the implications of the ruling and delve into the future of Holocaust Scholarship as we ponder the future of Holocaust Studies and Scholarship, and ‘What is at Stake?’

Dr. Jan Grabowski

Jan Grabowski is Professor of History at the University of Ottawa. His books include Polacy, nic się nie stało! Polemiki z Zagładą w tle [Poles, Nothing Happened! Polemics with the Holocaust in the Background] (2021); Na posterunku: Udział polskiej policji granatowej i kryminalnej w zagładzie Żydów [On Duty: Participation of Blue and Criminal Police in the Destruction of the Jews], (2020); Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland (2013), which won the Yad Vashem International Book Prize; and “Ja Tego Żyda Znam!”: Szantażowanie Żydów w Warszawie, 1939-1943 [“I Know that Jew!”: The Blackmailing of Jews in Warsaw, 1939-1943] (2004). He is a member of the Royal Society of Canada and has held fellowships and guest professorships at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Munich), the University of Haifa, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Yad Vashem.

Dr. Natalia Aleksiun

Natalia Aleksiun, a resident scholar at Classrooms Without Borders, is the Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Graduate School of Jewish Studies, Touro College, New York. She studied Polish and Jewish history at the Warsaw University, the Graduate School of Social Studies in Warsaw and Hebrew University in Jerusalem and New York University. She received her doctorate from Warsaw University in 2001 and from New York University in 2010. She has published widely on the history of Polish Jews, Polish–Jewish relations and Jewish historiography. Her first book Where to? The Zionist Movement in Poland, 1944-1950 (in Polish) appeared in 2002. Her second book Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust is forthcoming in June 2021 with Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. She coedited the twentieth volume of Polin, devoted to the memory of the Holocaust and the twenty ninth volume devoted to Jewish history writing in Eastern Europe. She is editor-in-chief of Eastern European Jewish Affairs. She is currently working on a book about the so-called cadaver affair at European Universities in the 1920s and 1930s and on a project dealing with daily lives of Jews in hiding in Galicia during the Holocaust.