Jan Grabowski (born 1962) is a Polish-Canadian historian on the faculty of the University of Ottawa, co-founder of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, and author of numerous studies relating to the Holocaust in Poland as well as Jewish-Polish relations during the 1939–1945 period.

Life

Grabowski was born in Warsaw to mixed parentage. His Jewish father, from a well-assimilated Kraków family, survived the Holocaust hiding in Warsaw, and took part in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. His Christian mother is from a noble Polish family. He immigrated to Canada in 1988, a year before the fall of communism.^[1]

According to Grabowski, he was involved in the underground printing presses for Solidarity as Independent Students' Union member between 1981 and 1985. In 1988 her had an invitation to continue his PhD in Canada, and he was able to leave as travel restrictions had been eased. As the time he thought "that communism was this rock that would never budge", and had he known that the regime would fall but a year later he would have stayed, though he does not regret moving to Canada.^[2]

Grabowski received his MA from the University of Warsaw in 1986, and his Ph.D. from the Université de Montréal in 1994. Since 1993 he has been on the faculty of the University of Ottawa. He co-founded the Polish Center for Holocaust Research and is the author of numerous studies relating to the Holocaust in Poland as well as Jewish-Polish relations during the 1939-1945 period.^[1] As an Ina Levine Invitational Scholar at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, he has conducted research into the Polish Blue Police during the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland.^[3][4]

Hunt for the Jews

In 2011 Grabowski published a book in Polish, Judenjagd. Polowanie na Zydow 1942-1945; and, in 2013, a revised and augmented English-language edition, Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland. The book, vividly describing Judenjagd (German for "Jew hunts") in Poland, focuses on one rural county in southeastern Poland, Dąbrowa Tarnowska.^[5][6] According to Grabowski, a whole mechanism was set up to hunt Jews. While Germans supervised the mechanism, all the individuals on the ground were Poles: villager night watchmen, informers, police, firefighters, and others. This dense web made it almost impossible for escaping Jews to hide their identity. The book was sharply criticized in Poland in particular for Grabowski's estimate of 200,000 Jews killed by Poles during the Holocaust. Grabowski received several death threats, leading to increased security in his department at the University of Ottawa.^[7][8][9] According to Grabowski, his estimate of 200,000 Jews killed by Poles is very conservative, as he did not include victims of the Polish Blue Police, who according to Warsaw Ghetto historian Emanuel Ringelblum killed hundreds of thousands of Jews.^[1] The book was awarded the 2014 Yad Vashem International Book Prize.^[10][11]

Negative reviews

Grzegorz Berendt, a professor at the University of Gdańsk and a member of the Jewish Historical Institute, criticizes Grabowski's claim of 200,000 Jews having been killed by Poles as “hot air.” According to Berendt, available research puts the number of escaped Jews at 50,000; no other number has been established by research. According to Berendt, Grabowski's number comes from an interview given 30 years ago, at the end of his life, by Szymon Datner, who had not conducted studies relating to the whole of Poland or even to just one of its districts. Berendt writes that it is difficult to accept Grabowski's number as scientific truth.^[12]

Historian Piotr Gontarczyk says that Grabowski's media activities show a similar approach to that of Jan T. Gross, in many respects incompatible, in Gontarczyk's view, with classical standards of scientific scholarship.^[13]

Historian Łukasz Męczykowski, in his review of the 2011 Polish Judenjagd book, writes that, while some historians try to seek truth calmly and impartially, others prefer passing condemnatory judgments, and Grabowski has chosen the latter path: Grabowski is largely focused on finding those who were supposedly guilty of collaboration, and is averse to acknowledging those who showed commendable behaviors. Męczykowski notes that Grabowski incorrectly accuses Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) of trying to inflate the number of Polish citizens who helped Jews. Męczykowski writes that Grabowski contradicts himself on certain points. Męczykowski writes that Grabowski, in calling upon Poles to admit their guilt, seems unaware that there has long since been an ongoing debate in Poland about Polish participation in atrocities against Jews, including educational programs prepared by Poland's IPN—contradicting Grabowski's statements about the Institute.^[14]

Historian Bogdan Musial, in his review of the 2011 Polish Judenjagd book, lists what he considers to be flaws and problems. Musial writes that Grabowski makes mistakes, ones that are sometimes easy to catch even for a casual reader. Musial notes that the book does not contain many sources. According to Musial, Grabowski shuns the literature on the subject or is perhaps simply not familiar with it. Musial also criticizes his use of trial transcripts to generalize attitudes about Jews to the local population. Additionally, the book lacks witness statements from Polish inhabitants, archives from the regional Polish resistance, and German statements. He writes that Grabowski ignores the hard economic conditions and the deportations of Poles from the described area, which Musial believes must have colored attitudes among the Poles. Musial notes that, while Grabowski writes extensively about antisemitic agitation before the war, the Germans' antisemitic campaign receives a mere three sentences. According to Musial, Grabowski lowers the number of Jewish survivors, while inflating the number of Poles complicit in German crimes. In his critique, Musial writes that Grabowski never questions statements from Jewish witnesess, while being highly critical of statements made by Poles.^[15]

Positive reviews

John-Paul Himka wrote that he found "Grabowski's exploration of how the moral climate in rural Poland became fatally skewed during the Nazi occupation" innovative and enlightening. Himka notes that the Polish men of the Baudienst took part in Jew hunts with particular relish, Grabowski recording the atrocities in chilling detail. Himka concludes: "This is a well-written, well-researched, highly illuminating study that takes us deep into the mechanisms of the Holocaust in rural Poland. In short: a brilliant book, and a harrowing read."^[16]

Shimon Redlich, in his review, criticizes the book's structure, in particular the lengthy quotations and appendix, the careless "claim of 'hundreds of thousands' of Jews seeking shelter among the Polish populace", which according to Redlich cannot be extrapolated to the whole country based on one single area, as well as language that at times betrays emotional involvement. However, Redlich says the book "should become required reading for scholars and students of Polish-Jewish relations".^[17]

Joshua D. Zimmerman's review found Grabowski's work to be a "weighty, superbly researched study" that punctuates the myth of Polish innocence during the Holocaust. According to Zimmerman, Grabowski's study is not about defaming or glorifying Poland, but rather about the evidence.^[18]

Rosa Lehmann, in her review, found Grabowski's work to be outstanding and firmly grounded in solid research.^[19]

Michael Fleming's review found the book insightful into how Poles in rural Poland were, not infrequently, complicit with German genocide, challenging readers' myths.^[20]

Samuel Kassow in his review essay in Yad Vashem Studies wrote: "These three books published under the auspices of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research are a historical achievement of the first order. These scholars – Jan Grabowski, Alina Skibinska, Barbara Engelking and Dariusz Libionka – have not only undermined the self-serving myths about Polish-Jewish relations in World War II. They have also set a new standard of careful, objective scholarship based on both Jewish and Polish sources and in so doing have written a new chapter in the history of Poland’s ongoing confrontation with the Holocaust."^[21]

Larry Ray in his review of Grabowski’s book called it "a highly systematic and scholarly study of atrocities and collaboration" and "an essential contribution to knowledge of the Holocaust and Polish-Jewish relations".^[22]

Support and condemnations

The website Fronda.pl ran a piece with the headline, "Sieg Heil, Mr. Grabowski", accompanied by a photo of Joseph Goebbels, following the publication of a favorable report in a German website. Grabowski sued the website's owner for libel and won.^[1]

In 2017, the Polish League Against Defamation released a statement signed by 134 Polish scientists protesting the "false and harmful portrayal of Poles and Poland during the Second World War and attempts to blame the Polish Nation for the Holocaust",^[23] which was sent to Grabowski's employer, the University of Ottawa, to all the colleges with which he was affiliated, and to all the publishers of his books. The statement pointed to German efforts to exterminate the Polish population itself, which made its occupation by Germany different from western Europe's occupation; numerous examples of Poles' assistance given to Jews; Poland's many wartime international protests at the plight of the Jewish population in German-occupied Poland; and the complexity of Polish-Jewish relations, aggravated by the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland.^[23]

Grabowski has been boycotted by the Polish-Canadian community, and Polish groups have attempted to have him fired from his academic position. According to multiple media reports, Grabowski has also faced harassment and death threats, leading to increased security patrols in his department at the University of Ottawa.^{[6][24][8][25][9][7]}

In Grabowski's defense, the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, which Grabowski co-founded, released a counter-letter signed by seven Holocaust historians, saying that "None of the 134 signatories is a Holocaust historian" and that "All these economists, linguists, oncologists, chemists, nuclear physicists, engineers, constructors of electromechanical appliances, environmental geologists, ethnomusicologists, theatrologists and priest professors present themselves as Holocaust experts, but cannot even quote the sources they refer to."^[26] Some 180 international historians of modern European history signed a letter in Grabowski's defense, saying his work "holds to the highest standards of academic research" and that the Polish League Against Defamation puts forth a "distorted and whitewashed version of the history of Poland during the Holocaust era". The historians further said they saw the campaign against Grabowski as "an attack on academic freedom and integrity."^[27]

Views

Grabowski has deplored plans for a monument to rescuers of Jews, to be located at Grzybowski Square, which was part of the wartime Warsaw Ghetto. He sees it as an attempt to rewrite history by inflating the role of the rescuers. Grabowski describes the rescuers as a "desperate, hunted, tiny minority" who were the exception to the rule. "Much of the Polish national ethos", says Grabowski, "is built on the heroic self-perception, and any attempt to show the darker side of wartime experience is met with indignation." The Ghetto site, he says, should be dedicated to Jewish suffering, and not to Polish courage.^[28][29]

Grabowski also criticizes the opening of the Ulma Family Museum of Poles Who Saved Jews in World War II, in Markowa, as a cynical use of the heroism of the exceptional Ulma family, in what he described as an attempt to present a false picture of the widespread saving of Jews in Poland, while according to him the reality was that the rescuers were a small, terrorized minority who feared, above all, their own Polish neighbors.^[30][1]

In 2018, following the Polish Parliament's adoption of a controversial Amendment to Poland's Act on the Institute of National Remembrance that would penalize "slandering or libeling the Polish nation" with imprisonment for up to three years, Grabowski compared the new legislation to pre-1939 law that had stipulated the same punishment. By way of example, he produced a 1936 Warsaw newspaper article which described a Jewish woman having been ejected from the University of Warsaw campus by Polish-chauvinist thugs. As she was being ejected, she exclaimed, "Polish animals!", and she was beaten up. But the police arrested her, not her assailants, and she was imprisoned for two months for insulting the Polish nation.^[31]

Grabowski recommended that the Israeli government refrain from dialogue with the Polish government, as, "given the current level of expressed anti-Semitism, I don’t think that any official meetings on this topic should take place." He further said that "The mass murder of Polish Jews was not abstract. It happened inside the space of the Polish nation, so this is why you cannot pretend that this is only a German-Jewish affair. There are no Polish bystanders in the Holocaust."^[32][8]

Works

• Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland,  Indiana University Press, 2013, 312 pp., ISBN 978-02-53010-74-2.
• Rescue for Money: ‘Paid Helpers’ in Poland, 1939-1945, Search and Research Series, Yad Vashem–The International Institute for Holocaust Research, Jerusalem, 2008, ISBN 9789653083257.
• ציד היהודים; בגידה ורצח בפולין בימי הכיבוש הגרמני. Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 2016. ​ISBN 9789653085312​
• Klucze i Kasa. Losy mienia żydowskiego w okupowanej Polsce, 1939-1945, Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badan nad Zagładą, Warszawa, 2014, 628 s. (ed. with Dariusz Libionka), Warsaw 2014 ​ISBN 978-83-63444-35-8​​

References

External links

• Homepage at the University of Ottawa
• Biography of the website of Polish Center for Holocaust Research