The Future of Holocaust Memory: Poland and Beyond
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Panel Discussion
Poland vs. Holocaust History Series Admission: Free Registration is required. |
Holocaust distortion in Poland involves reshaping or minimizing facts about the Holocaust, often emphasizing Polish victimhood while obscuring instances of local collaboration, participation, or indifference. It appears in political rhetoric, memory laws, public commemorations, and attacks on critical scholarship. YIVO’s Poland vs. Holocaust History series examines these dynamics and situates the Polish case within a broader European context.
This discussion panel will reflect on the future of Holocaust memory in Poland and in a broader international context. Bringing together Jan T. Gross, Elżbieta Janicka, and Jan Grabowski, the conversation will address the evolving challenges facing Holocaust remembrance amid political polarization, historical revisionism, and generational change. The panelists will consider the roles of scholarship, education, public debate, and cultural institutions in sustaining honest engagement with the past. The discussion will also explore how national and transnational perspectives can coexist, and what is at stake for historical truth, democratic values, and moral responsibility in shaping the future of Holocaust memory.
About the Speakers
Jan T. Gross is the Norman B. Tomlinson ‘16 and ‘48 Professor of War and Society, Emeritus at Princeton University. He was a 2001 National Book Award nominee for his widely acclaimed Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. His most recent book, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz, was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post.
Elżbieta Janicka is a historian of literature, cultural anthropologist, and visual artist. She received her M.A. at the Université Paris VII Denis Diderot and her Ph.D. and postdoctoral degree at Warsaw University. Janicka is the author of Sztuka czy Naród? [Art or the Nation?] (Kraków: Universitas, 2006) and Festung Warschau [Forteress Warsaw] (Warszawa: Krytyka Polityczna, 2011). She co-authored Philo-Semitic Violence. Poland’s Jewish Past in New Polish Narratives (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021; with Tomasz Żukowski) and This Was Not America: A Wrangle Through Jewish-Polish-American History (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2022; with Michael Steinlauf). Her individual exhibitions are: Ja, fotografia (1998); Miejsce nieparzyste [The Odd Place] (2006); and Inne Miasto [Other City] (2013, with Wojciech Wilczyk). Her research pertains to the identity and community building function of Polish antisemitism as well as the place and role of the Polish majority in the structure of the Holocaust. She works at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Jan Grabowski is a Professor of History at the University of Ottawa and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His interests focus on the Holocaust in Poland and, more specifically, on the relations between Jews and Poles during the war. He has authored/co-authored or edited twenty books and published more than eighty articles published in learned journals in many languages. Grabowski’s book Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland has been awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for 2014. In 2018 he co-edited and co-authored “Dalej jest noc” [Night Without End] (a two-volume study of the fate of the Jews in selected counties of occupied Poland). Night Without End was published in 2022 in English by Indiana University Press. Grabowski’s most recent book On Duty: The Role of the Polish “Blue” Police in the Holocaust was published in Poland in March 2020, and the English edition was published in May 2024 by Yad Vashem Presses.