Shapiro Scholar Jan Grabowski Presents on New Findings in Research on Holocaust in Poland

Professor Jan Grabowski, the 2022-2023 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence, gave a public lecture entitled “Holocaust in Poland: New Research, New Findings” on March 29, 2023. Presented by the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the USC Shoah Foundation, Professor Grabowski spoke about the importance of local histories in the field of Holocaust Studies and its wider implications for facing Holocaust distortion in Poland today.

Professor Grabowski, a historian of Polish Jews and Polish-Jewish relations from 1939-1945, began his lecture by emphasizing the importance of primary sources, such as oral testimonies in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive. These sources allow historians to look at the stories of individuals, which means that local histories can be connected to global events. The study of microhistories reveals the plethora of ways that persecution, collaboration, and resistance happened in Poland from 1939 to 1945.

Citing Raul Hilberg’s victim-perpetrator-bystander triad as a foundational concept in the field, Professor Grabowski asserts that the term “bystander” does not fully allow historians to comprehend the multitude of roles that Eastern Europeans took on. This term must be problematized when studying the Holocaust in Poland as this is where nearly 5 million Jews were murdered. Using the term “bystander” allowed Poles to claim a certain distance from the event that, historically speaking, was not there. Instead of “bystander,” Professor Grabowski prefers “participating observers,” a term that allows us to remove the distance between the bystander and the event.

Throughout his lecture, Professor Grabowski shared numerous discoveries from archives he explored during his research. These documents showed how Poles engaged with their communities during the Holocaust and informed the central research questions that he concerned himself with, such as: How much did local populations know about the impending Holocaust? How open was the German system of terror? Did non-German participating observers realize their own goals? Were there collusion attempts to keep Polish-Jewish property out of German hands? What were the roots of hate, and when did life lose its absolute value? These questions are among the inquiries that the field of Holocaust Studies is addressing.

Professor Grabowski then shifted his lecture to place his recent work, Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in German-Occupied Poland, co-edited with Barbara Engelking, within the larger discourse about the state of Holocaust Studies in Poland today. A huge scholarly achievement, Night Without End examines the responses to persecution in different localities in Poland to further reveal what happened on the ground in Poland during the German occupation.

In the book’s eight chapters, the authors, including the co-editors, examine the daily lives of Poles in nine counties in Poland. Professor Grabowski concerned himself with the ways in which people in these regions acted and how they moved about in these localities during the war. The studies of these counties offer a different history than those of urban areas such as Warsaw and Kraków, revealing the places in Poland with the highest and lowest survival rates of Jewish Poles and exposing a pattern of higher death rates on Sundays after mass. The analysis allows Professor Grabowski to look at the ways in which the genocidal process evolved differently in the various local contexts and how the local contexts revealed general policies.

The book sparked distortionist reactions in Poland. While the Polish government does not deny the events of the Holocaust, they deny the multitude of active roles that Poles took during the Holocaust. Professor Grabowski argued that the implications of Holocaust distortion in Poland are immense. The Holocaust happened in Poland: nearly five of the six million Jewish victims were murdered on Polish soil, and three million Jewish victims of the Holocaust were Poles. Both Jews who already lived in Poland and those who were brought there to be murdered died in Poland. Documents such as the August Files (transcripts of court proceedings of the trials of Poles who collaborated with Germans) contradict the collective memory of Polish history during the Second World War.

Ultimately, Professor Grabowski’s work addresses the realities of people who were thrust into situations they were not prepared for and the ways in which people became entangled in the process of genocide on the local level.

In the Q&A that followed Professor Grabowski’s remarks, there were discussions about the agency of Poles during the German occupation, post-Holocaust studies, and national narratives of the Holocaust. Professor Grabowski also commented on whether there is a reckoning of the Holocaust among the younger Polish generations.

Learn more about Professor Jan Grabowski here.