Jan Grabowski
Jan Grabowski
Born	1962 Warsaw
Nationality	Polish-Canadian
Occupation	Historian
Known for	The Holocaust in Poland, 1939-1945 Polish-Jewish relations
Title	Dr.
Academic background
Alma mater	Université de Montréal
Academic work
Institutions	University of Ottawa
Notable works	Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland

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 studies on the Holocaust in Poland and on Jewish-Polish relations during the 1939–1945 period.

Life

Grabowski was born in Warsaw into an ethnically mixed family. His Jewish father, from an assimilated Kraków family, survived the Holocaust hiding in Warsaw, and took part in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. According to Haaretz, Grabowski's Christian mother is from a Polish szlachta (noble) family. Grabowski emigrated to Canada in 1988, a year before the fall of communism.^[1][2]

According to Grabowski, he was involved in the underground printing presses for Solidarity as Independent Students' Union member between 1981 and 1985. In 1988 he 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.^[3]

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 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.^[4][5]

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 describes Judenjagd (German for "Jew hunts"), focusing on one pre-war rural county in southeastern Poland, Dąbrowa Tarnowska, chosen for availability of preserved archives.^[6][7] 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 awarded the 2014 Yad Vashem International Book Prize.^[8][9]

In 2016 Grabowski published a revised and expanded Hebrew version of the book via Yad Vashem.^[1] According to Grabowski, Poles killed, directly or indirectly, more than 200,000 Jews during the Holocaust, with this estimate being very conservative as he did not include victims of the Polish Blue Police, who according to Warsaw Ghetto historian Emanuel Ringelblum played a role in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews.^[10][1] According to Grabowski "the great majority of Jews in hiding perished as a consequence of betrayal. They were denounced or simply seized, tied up and delivered by locals to the nearest station of the Polish police, or to the German gendarmerie".^[1]

Grabowski was criticized by several historians, particularly for the estimate of 200,000 Jews killed by Poles during the Holocaust.^[11]

Reception

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. Berendt says that, 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] Grabowski responded that Berendt's statements about Datner's research is "from a historian who has yet to author his first book about the Holocaust", that Datner acquired his statistics firsthand as a Jew under occupation and as an historian for more than 40 years, that Warsaw Ghetto historian Emanuel Ringelblum during the war estimated the victims of Polish policemen alone in the hundreds of thousands, and that recent research corroborates Datner's numbers.^[13]

Historian Bogdan Musial, in his review of the 2011 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.^[14] Grabowski rejects Musial's critique, writing that it is an attempt to disparage serious historical research on the basis of its subject matter and conclusions and that it fails to address the quality of the research methodology.^[15]

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".^[16]

Krystyna Samsonowska, a historian at Jagiellonian University and specialist in Polish-Jewish relations, in her review of the book, noted that Grabowski did not use all available sources and "gave up" on actual field research, for example, by not even trying to contact the families of Jews who survived the German occupation in Dabrowa Tarnowska, or the Poles who hid them. By using broader sources, Samsonowska identifies by name 90 Jews who survived the war by hiding in the county, as opposed to the 38, which is the number given by Grabowski. Samsonowska notes that the likely number of survivors was much higher. She also notes that Grabowski understated by half the number of Polish Righteous Among Nations from the county who have been honored by Yad Vashem for helping Jews.^[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]

Historian Piotr Gontarczyk writes that Grabowski's media activities display a comparable path to that of Jan T. Gross, which are, according to Gontarczyk, in many respects incompatible with academic standards of scientific scholarship.^[19]

Historian Łukasz Męczykowski, in a histmag.org review of the 2011 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.^[20]

John-Paul Himka writes 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 20-year-old Polish men of the Baudienst yunaki 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."^[21]

Samuel Kassow, in a review essay in Yad Vashem Studies, writes, of Grabowski's book and of books by three other scholars (Alina Skibinska, Barbara Engelking, and Dariusz Libionka), that they "are a historical achievement of the first order." He describes them as undermining "the self-serving myths about Polish-Jewish relations in World War II.", and as being works of careful and objective scholarship.^[22]

Larry Ray's review of Grabowski’s book calls it "a highly systematic and scholarly study of atrocities and collaboration", and "an essential contribution to knowledge of the Holocaust and Polish-Jewish relations".^[23]

Rosa Lehmann, in her review, finds Grabowski's work to be outstanding and firmly grounded in solid research.^[24]

Michael Fleming's review commends the book's insights into how rural Poles were, not infrequently, complicit with German genocide, challenging readers' myths.^{[25][verification needed]}

Controversy

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",^[26] 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.^[26]

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.^{[7][27][11][28][29][30]}

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."^[31] 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."^[32]

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.^[33][34]

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.^[35][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.^[36]

In 2018, Grabowski recommended that the Israeli government refrain from dialogue with the Polish government about changes to Poland's Holocaust law, 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."^[37][11]

Bibliography

• Historia Kanady, 2001, a survey of Canadian history in Polish.^[38][39]
• "Ja tego Żyda znam!" Szantażowanie Żydów w Warszawie, 1939-1943, 2004, covering blackmailing (szmalcownik) of Jews in Warsaw during 1939-1943. According to Grabowski, blackmailers were not from the social margins but were rather ordinary craftsmen, from good families.^[38][40]
• Rescue for Money: ‘Paid Helpers’ in Poland, 1939-1945, Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, 2008, discussing patterns of Poles' rescue of Jews, in particular monetary compensation paid to Poles by Jews.^[38][16]
• (with Barbara Engelking) Żydów łamiących prawo należy karać śmiercią! "Przestępczość" Żydów w Warszawie, 1939-1942, discussing criminal behavior in the Warsaw Ghetto.^[38][41]
• (with Barbara Engelking) Zarys krajobrazu: wieś polska wobec zagłady Żydów 1942-1945, 2011, discussing the situation of Jews trying to hide in the Polish countryside during the Holocaust.^[38][42]
• (edited with Dariusz Libionka) Klucze i kasa: o mieniu żydowskim w Polsce pod okupacją niemiecką i we wczesnych latach powojennych, 1939-1950, 2011, discussing the robbery of Jewish property during the Holocaust and after the war.^[38][43]
• 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, Jerusalem, Yad Vashem–The International Institute for Holocaust Research, 2008, ISBN 9789653083257.
• ציד היהודים; בגידה ורצח בפולין בימי הכיבוש הגרמני, Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, 2016, ISBN 9789653085312
• (edited with Dariusz Libionka) Klucze i Kasa. Losy mienia żydowskiego w okupowanej Polsce, 1939-1945, Warsaw, Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badan nad Zagładą, 2014, 628 pp., ISBN 978-83-63444-35-8

References

External links

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