Ewa Kurek

Ewa Kurek (born 1951) is a Polish historian whose research focus is on Polish-Jewish relations before and during World War II. In her later career, she became known for her controversial views regarding the Holocaust in Poland.

Biography

In the years 1971-1977 she studied history at the Catholic University of Lublin, where in 1979 obtained a master's degree, and ten years later a doctorate in history. She was an editor and co-editor of the underground “NSZZ Solidarność FSC Information Bulletin in Lublin,” cooperated with the editors of the underground “Spotkania” and Polish and American scientific and press editorial offices. She has been a lecturer in the Humanities-Economy Academy in Łódź and Higher School of Skills in Kielce.

Reception and controversy

Kurek's 2001 work Dzieci żydowskie w klasztorach. Udział żenskich zgromadzeń zakonnych w akcji ratowania dzieci żydowskich w Polsce w latach 1939–1945 (Jewish Children in Convents. The Participation of Nuns’ Congregations in the Rescue Operation of Jewish Children in Poland Between 1939–1945) was described as groundbreaking by Joanna Michlic. However, Michlic describes Kurek's chapter on postwar recovery of the children as "rather biased perspective colored by anti-Jewish prejudices (belief in the Jewish sale of children)", saying Kurek's assumptions are questionable from historical and moral points of view. In the chapter, Kurek implies that Jewish children would have been "better off" had they been left in the hands of Polish convents and families, blaming Jewish organizations and individuals for traumtic changes in the children's lives, rather than the war and the genocidal destruction of Jewish families.

Armin Rosen writing in Tablet, an American-Jewish magazine, argues that according to Kurek, Jews lie about Polish conduct in WWII in order to smear Poland and hide their own duplicity. According to Rosen, Kurek writings imply that Poland's urbanized Jews were Nazi collaborators during the Holocaust. According to Rosen, Kurek works contain damning claims like that "Jews had fun in the ghettos" during the Nazi occupation of Poland.

In 2006, Kurek advanced an interpretation, described as "outlandish" by Laurence Weinbaum, of ghetto development in German-occupied Poland in a book she published on the Warsaw ghetto. According to Kurek ghettos "were essentially autonomous Jewish provinces built in the years 1939-42 by Polish Jews with the approval of the German occupation authorities", and the Jews "for the first time in over 2,000 years built their own framework of Jewish sovereignty". Kurek has also said that the situation of ethnic Poles in the years 1939-42, outside the ghetto, was far worse than the situation of the Jews who were held in confinement in the ghettos.

In 2016 she circulated a petition calling for the exhumation of the victims of the Jedwabne pogrom.

According to David Silberklang, editor-in-chief of Yad Vashem Studies, Kurek "is maybe the only legitimate Holocaust scholar to have become an alleged Holocaust revisionist or distorter during a later phase of her career", with David Irving being a possible precedent, however Irving lacked Kurek's credentials. According to the philosopher Berel Lang, Kurek is more subtle than Irving. She doesn’t deny the genocide but argues rather that the Jews were complicit with the Nazis in organizing the wartime ghetto system.

Selected works

• Ewa Kurek (1997). Your Life is Worth Mine: How Polish Nuns Saved Hundreds of Jewish Children in German-occupied Poland, 1939-1945. Hippocrene Books. ISBN 978-0-7818-0409-7., Introduction by Jan Karski
• Ewa Kurek (6 August 2012). Polish-Jewish Relations 1939-1945: Beyond the Limits of Solidarity. iUniverse. ISBN 978-1-4759-3832-6.
• Ewa Kurek (1992) The Role of Polish Nuns in the Rescue of Jews 1939-1945 NYU Press. ISBN 9780814762295.

External links

• Ewa Kurek-Lesik in nauka-polska.pl database