Jan Grabowski | |
|---|---|
 Grabowski in 2018 | |
| Born | June 24, 1962 (61 years old) Warsaw, Poland |
| Nationality | Polish-Canadian |
| Occupation | Historian |
| Awards | Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research |
| Academic background | |
| Education | Université de Montréal (PhD, 1994)[1] |
| Thesis | 'The Common Ground. Settled Natives and French in Montréal 1667–1760' (1993) |
| Academic work | |
| Era |
|
| Institutions | University of Ottawa |
| Notable works | Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland (2013) |
| Website | Homepage, University of Ottawa |
Jan Zbigniew Grabowski (born June 24, 1962) is a Polish-Canadian professor of history at theUniversity of Ottawa, specializing in Jewish–Polish relations inGerman-occupied Poland duringWorld War II and theHolocaust in Poland.[1]
Co-founder in 2003 of thePolish Center for Holocaust Research, in Warsaw, Poland, Grabowski is best known for his bookHunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland (2013), which won theYad Vashem International Book Prize.[2]
Grabowski was born in Warsaw to aRoman Catholic mother andJewish father.[3] His father,Zbigniew Ryszard Grabowski né Abrahamer [pl], a Holocaust survivor and chemistry professor[4] fromKraków, fought in the 1944Warsaw Uprising.[5]
While at theUniversity of Warsaw, Grabowski was active in theIndependent Students' Union between 1981 and 1985, where he helped to run an underground printing press for theSolidarity movement. He received his M.A. in 1986,[6] and in 1988 he emigrated to Canada aftertravel restrictions had been eased byPoland's communist government.[5] If he had known the regime would fall a year later, he would have stayed, he told an interviewer: "When I left in 1988 I thought there was no future for any young person in Poland. It felt like you were looking at the world through a thick wall of glass. It was sort of an un-reality ... the rules were oblique, strange, inhuman even. Then after one year the system seemed to collapse like a house of cards."[6] He received his Ph.D. from theUniversité de Montréal in 1994 for a thesis entitledThe Common Ground. Settled Natives and French in Montréal 1667–1760.[7]
Grabowski became a faculty member at theUniversity of Ottawa in 1993.[5] In 2016–17 he was an Ina Levine Invitational Scholar at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he conducted research into theBlue Police for a project entitled "Polish 'Blue' Police, Bystanders, and the Holocaust in Occupied Poland, 1939–1945".[8][9] He received a grant for the project (2016–2020) from the CanadianSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council.[10]
Grabowski is best known for his bookHunt for the Jews, first published in Poland in 2011 asJudenjagd: Polowanie na Żydów 1942–1945.[11] In 2013 a revised and updated edition was published byIndiana University Press asHunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland,[12] and in 2016 a revised and expanded edition was published in Hebrew byYad Vashem.[13][5]
Awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize in 2014,[2] the book describes theJudenjagd (German: "Jew hunt") from 1942 onwards, focusing onDąbrowa Tarnowska County,[14] a rural area in southeastern Poland.[15] TheJudenjagd was the German search for Jews who had escaped from the liquidatedghettos in Poland and were trying to hide among the non-Jewish population.[16] Grabowski relied on Polish court records from the 1940s, post-war testimony collected by theCentral Committee of Polish Jews, and records gathered in Germany during investigations in the 1960s.[17] In a 2015 interview, he described the mechanics of the "hunt":
The German policy was based on terror. Poles faced the death penalty for any help they gave to Jews. Also, the Germans created a so-called "hostage" system among the Poles. In every community they designated people who would be rotated every couple of weeks. They were responsible for informing the Polish police, or the Germans, about Jews hiding in their towns. If a Jew was discovered that had not been reported, the so-called hostages would be harshly punished. So everyone was highly motivated to get rid of the Jews.[3]
According to Grabowski, most Jews in hiding were given up by local people to theBlue Police or directly to the Germans. He said that Poles were "directly or indirectly" responsible for most of the deaths of over 200,000 Jews, not counting victims of the police; he explained that by "most", it could be 60 percent or as high as 90 percent.[5][a]
The book sparked a heated public debate in Poland.[17]
Grabowski's bookThe Polish Police: Collaboration in the Holocaust (2017), published by theUnited States Holocaust Memorial Museum, is based on his 2016 Ina Levine Annual Lecture on theBlue Police.[9]
In 2018, Grabowski andBarbara Engelking co-edited a two-volume study,Dalej jest noc: losy Żydów w wybranych powiatach okupowanej Polski (Night without End: The Fates of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland). Published by thePolish Center for Holocaust Research, the study focused on nine counties in German-occupied Poland during the Holocaust, giving a detailed account of the fate of the area's Jews and of the question of Polish collaboration with the German occupiers. Grabowski contributed a chapter onWęgrów County. He told a newspaper that the work "talks about Polish virtue just as much. It paints a truthful picture."[20]
Mark Weitzman, director of government affairs for theSimon Wiesenthal Center, said it was "meticulously researched and sourced".[20] Polish historianJacek Chrobaczyński [pl] commended its authors for deconstructing political myths that persist in Polish history, journalism, church, and politics.[21] However, scholars associated with Poland'sInstitute of National Remembrance alleged that the study used unreliable sources, selectively treated witness statements, presented rumor as fact, and underestimated thedraconian nature of the German occupation.[22][23][24]
ThePolish League Against Defamation, a group whose stated aim is to protect "Poland's good name", funded a civil case against Grabowski and Engelking in Poland, brought by the 81-year-old niece of a Polish villager who was accused in the book by witness testimony of having betrayed Jews to the Germans. In February 2021, a Warsaw court ruled that Grabowski and Engelking must apologize for their claims about the villager, but it did not order them to pay compensation.[25][26]
In response to the court ruling, thePOLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews,Yad Vashem, and theSimon Wiesenthal Center released statements expressing their concerns about the ruling's effects onacademic freedom andfreedom of speech.[27][28] The POLIN Museum stated that the suit had been "an attempt to frighten scholars away from publishing the results of their research out of fear of a lawsuit and the ensuing costly litigation."[29][30]
In August 2021, an appeals court overturned the ruling against Grabowski and Engelking, arguing in favour of academic freedom.[31]
In 2023, Grabowski and historian Shira Klein published an article in theJournal of Holocaust Research which stated that Wikipedia spread misinformation about the history of Jews in Poland due to the work of a small group of editors.[32] Grabowski said,[33]
As a historian, I was aware for a long time of various distortions of the history of the Holocaust on Wikipedia. What I found shocking, was the sheer scale of the phenomenon, its lasting character and the small number of individuals needed to distort the history of one of the greatest tragedies in the history of humanity.
In 2016, Grabowski published a paper criticizing what he called "the history policy of the Polish state", and arguing that "the state-sponsored version of history seeks to undo the findings of the last few decades and to forcibly introduce a sanitized, feel-good narrative".[34] He has deplored plans for a monument to rescuers of Jews, to be located atGrzybowski Square, which was part of the wartimeWarsaw Ghetto; he sees it as an attempt to inflate the role ofthe rescuers, whom he describes as a "desperate, hunted, tiny minority", the exception to the rule. The ghetto site should be dedicated, he argues, to Jewish suffering, not to Polish courage.[35][36]
Poland's embassy in Ottawa criticized Grabowski in 2016 for "groundless opinions and accusations" after he wrote an article forMaclean's about Poland's controversial amendment to itsAct on the Institute of National Remembrance.[37] The amendment would have penalized, with imprisonment for up to three years, anyone defaming Poland by accusing it of complicity in the Holocaust,[38] with exceptions for "freedom of research, discussion of history, and artistic activity".[39][40]
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In July 2017, Grabowski criticized theUlma-Family Museum of Poles Who Saved Jews in World War II, which opened inMarkowa in 2016. The garden will have plaques identifying the 1,500 towns in which the nearly 6,700 Poles lived who helped Jews and were recognized byYad Vashem asRighteous Among the Nations.[41] In Grabowski's view, the museum should provide more information about the Polish neighbours of the Ulma family and others who aided Jews.[42]
Grabowski co-wrote aHaaretz opinion piece in December 2018 criticizing Israeli historianDaniel Blatman, professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at theHebrew University of Jerusalem, for accepting the post of chief historian at the newly formedWarsaw Ghetto Museum in Warsaw, Poland, and thus agreeing to be "the poster boy of [Polish] state authorities bent on turning back the clock and distorting the history of the Holocaust".[43] In January 2019 Blatman responded inHaaretz that, while scholars at the Center for Holocaust Research had provided valuable insights into involvement in the Holocaust by parts of the Polish population, they did not give due weight to the terror and violence perpetrated by the Germans against Poles under German occupation.[44]
Since publication ofHunt for the Jews, Grabowski has become subject to significant criticism in Poland, particularly from groups associated with Polishright-wing spectrum. Some of them[which?] attempted to have him fired from his academic position, and he has faced harassment and death threats, leading to increased security patrols in his department at the University of Ottawa.[45][46][47]
On 7 June 2017, thePolish League Against Defamation (PLPZ) published a statement signed by about 130 Polish scholars — none of them historians of the Holocaust — protesting against Grabowski's research, which allegedly portrayed a "false and wrongful image of Poland and Polish people".[48][49] In response, thePolish Center for Holocaust Research issued a statement of its own, entitled "In defence of Jan Grabowski's good name" — signed by seven of its members, includingBarbara Engelking,Jacek Leociak andDariusz Libionka, it called the criticism "as brutal as it is absurd".[49] On 19 June 2017, about 180 historians of Holocaust and modern European history, includingChristopher Browning,Mary Fulbrook,Deborah Lipstadt,Antony Polonsky,Dina Porat,Yitzhak Arad, andRobert Jan van Pelt, signed an open letter in Grabowski's defence, describing the campaign against Grabowski as "an attack on academic freedom and integrity", the letter emphasized that "[h]is scholarship [held] to the highest standards of academic research and publication", and that the PLPZ attempted to put forth a "distorted and whitewashed version of the history of Poland during the Holocaust era".[48] In November 2018, Grabowski filed a defemation lawsuit in Warsaw against the PLPZ; he asked that each of their signatories buy a copy ofDalej jest noc and donate it to a Polish high school.[50][18]
On 30 May 2023, a lecture by Grabowski at theGerman Historical Institute in Warsaw was cancelled after far-right MPGrzegorz Braun smashed Grabowski'smicrophone.[51]
"So –... 200,000 Jews were murdered while hiding on the Aryan side?" – "Yes, and based on detailed analysis of the circumstances in which they perished, I formulated a research hypothesis that the majority – though at this stage of research I am not able to say whether it was 60 or 90 percent – lost their lives at the hands of Poles or with their complicity." (Original: "A więc –... ok. 200 tys. Żydów zostało zamordowanych, gdy się ukrywali po aryjskiej stronie?" – "Tak, i na podstawie szczegółowej analizy tego, w jakich okolicznościach ginęli, sformułowałem hipotezę badawczą, że większość – choć nie jestem na tym etapie badań w stanie powiedzieć, czy było to 60, czy 90 proc. – straciła życie z rąk Polaków albo przy ich współudziale.")[19]
"The Polish Embassy in Ottawa responds to Jan Grabowski"Archived 22 August 2018 at theWayback Machine.Macleans, 30 September 2016.
Stoffel, Derek (20 February 2018)."Canadian historian joins uproar in Israel over Polish Holocaust law"Archived 26 March 2018 at theWayback Machine. CBC News.
Event was intended to address efforts by Polish leaders to suppress uncomfortable truths about the history of antisemitism in the country before and during the Holocaust.
A Polish radical right-wing MP's violent disturbance at a lecture on the Holocaust at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw prevented a renowned historian and researcher from speaking.
