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 a mixed family. His Jewish Father, originally from a well assimilated Krakow family, survived the Holocaust by 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]

In 2018, Grabowski intends to release a 1,200 page report detailing the fate of Jews in nine Powiats of occupied Poland: Węgrów, Sokołów, Biłgoraj, Dębica, Miechów, Nowy Targ, Bochnia, Bielsko Podlaska, Złoczów and Łuków.^[5] According to Grabowski, the up-coming report is "very bleak" showing widespread Polish complicity in Jewish deaths, in what is "bound to add fuel to the fire of Polish government denial and right-wing indignation".^[6]

Hunt for the Jews

In 2011 Grabowski released a book in Polish titled Judenjagd. Polowanie na Zydow 1942-1945, and in 2013 an English extended and improved version titled Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland. The book which vividly describes Judenjagd (Jew hunts) in Poland focusing on one rural county in southeastern Poland Dabrowa Tarnowska,^[7][8] received positive reviews in peer-reviewed journals and was awarded the 2014 Yad Vashem International Book Prize.^[9][10] however it was sharply criticized in Poland in particular due to Grabowski's estimate of 200,000 Jews killed by Poles during the Holocaust.^[11]

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. According to Grabowski his estimate of 200,000 Jews killed by Polses 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]

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."^[12] 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".^[13]

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] Responding to a piece in Haaretz about Poles who hunted Jews,^[1] Grzegorz Berendt, a historian at Poland's Institute of National Remembrance and the University of Gdańsk, wrote an opinion piece in which he said his research supported 50,000 Jewish escapees and that other numbers of escapees have not been proven by research.^[14]

Condemnations, threats and support

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",^[15] 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, influenced by the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland.^[15]

Grabowski has been boycotted by the Polish-Canadian community, regularly harassed by right-wing zealots, himself and his family threatened with death, and Polish groups have attempted to have him fired from his academic position multiple times.^{[8][6][16][17]} Following the Polish League Against Defamation's letter in 2017, the increased amount of death threats lead to increased security patrols in his department at the University of Ottawa.^[11][18]

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."^[19] 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 "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."^[20]

Views

Grabowski has deplored plans for a monument for the rescuers of Jews at Grzybowski Square, part of the wartime Warsaw Ghetto, as an attempt to rewrite history and inflate the role of rescuers of Jews. According to Grabowski, the rescuers were a "desperate, hunted, tiny minority" and were the exception to the norm. According to Grabowski "Much of the Polish national ethos is built on the heroic self-perception and any attempt to show the darker side of wartime experience is met with indignation", and the ghetto site should be dedicated to Jewish suffering and not to Polish bravery.^[21][22] Grabowski also criticized the opening of The Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews in World War II in Markowa as presenting an unbalanced picture, a cynical use of heroism of the Ulma family which was exceptional in an attempt to present a false picture that saving Jews in Poland was widespread, while the reality was that they were a small terrorized minority who feared, most of all, their own Polish neighbors.^[23][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.^[24]

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."^[25][16]

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.

References

External links

• Homepage at the University of Ottawa
• Biography Template:Pl icon