Barbara Engelking | |
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Born | (1962-04-22)22 April 1962 (age 62) Warsaw, Poland |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Polish Academy of Sciences University of Warsaw |
Academic work | |
Era | 20th century |
Institutions | Polish Center for Holocaust Research |
Main interests | Holocaust in Poland |
Notable works | Such a Beautiful Sunny Day: Jews Seeking Refuge in the Polish Countryside, 1942–1945 The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City Dalej jest noc (Night Without End) (editor) |
Barbara Engelking (born 22 April 1962) is a Polish psychologist and sociologist specializing inHolocaust studies.[1][2] The founder and director of thePolish Center for Holocaust Research inWarsaw, she is the author or editor of several works on theHolocaust in Poland.
Born in Warsaw, Engelking received an MA in psychology from theUniversity of Warsaw in 1988 and a Ph.D. in sociology from thePolish Academy of Sciences, also in Warsaw,[1] for a thesis onThe Experience of the Holocaust and its Consequences in Autobiographical Accounts (1993).[3]
Since 1993, Engelking has been an assistant then associate professor at thePolish Center for Holocaust Research, part of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at thePolish Academy of Sciences.[3] Since 2014, she has been chair of Poland'sInternational Auschwitz Council [pl].[4][5] From November 2015 until April 2016, she was the Ina Levine Invitational Scholar at theUnited States Holocaust Memorial Museum Mandel Center in Washington, D.C.[1]
Engelking's bookThe Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City (2009), written withJacek Leociak, provides detailed maps of theghetto so that readers can locate the streets and former community structures.Michael Marrus described it as "a stunning work, one of the most important books on the history of the Nazi Holocaust".[6]
In a review of Engelking's bookSuch a Beautiful Sunny Day: Jews Seeking Refuge in the Polish Countryside, 1942–1945 (2016), first published in Polish in 2012,Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe wrote that it challenged the German tendency to neglect non-German Holocaust perpetrators, as well as the Polish tendency to view Poles inGerman-occupied Poland entirely as victims.[7] In 2013 historianSamuel Kassow described Engelking's work and that of three other scholars (Jan Grabowski,Alina Skibińska, andDariusz Libionka) as a "historical achievement of the first order", undermining "the self-serving myths about Polish-Jewish relations in World War II".[8]
In 2018 Engelking and Grabowski co-editedDalej jest noc: losy Żydów w wybranych powiatach okupowanej Polski (Night without End: The Fate of Jews in German-Occupied Poland), a two-volume, 1,600-page study of nine counties in German-occupied Poland during the Holocaust.[9]
In February 2021, a Warsaw court ruled that Grabowski and Engelking must apologize for their claims aboutEdward Malinowski (thesołtys of the Polish village of Malinowo) inDalej jest noc;[10] in August, the ruling was overturned by an appeals court.[11]