Jan Grabowski

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Jan Grabowski
Jan Grabowski
Born1962 (age 61–62)
Warsaw
NationalityPolish-Canadian
OccupationHistorian
Known forThe Holocaust in Poland, 1939-1945 Polish-Jewish relations
TitleDr.
Academic background
Alma materUniversité de Montréal
Academic work
InstitutionsUniversity of Ottawa
Notable worksHunt 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

File:Jan Grabowski at USHMM.jpg
Jan Grabowski at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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 County, 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]

While generally well received,[11] Grabowski was criticized by several historians, particularly for the estimate of 200,000 Jews killed by Poles during the Holocaust.[12]

Reception

Joshua D. Zimmerman's review found Grabowski's work to be a "weighty, superbly researched study" that punctuated the myth of Polish innocence during the Holocaust. According to Zimmerman, Grabowski's study was not about defaming or glorifying Poland, but rather about the evidence.[13]

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 noted that the young Polish men of the Baudienst yunaki took part in Jew hunts with particular relish, Grabowski recording the atrocities in chilling detail. Himka concluded: "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."[14]

Grzegorz Berendt, a professor at the University of Gdańsk and a member of the Jewish Historical Institute, criticized Grabowski's claim of 200,000 Jews having been killed by Poles. According to Berendt, available research puts the number of escaped Jews at 50,000. Berendt said 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 wrote that it was difficult to accept Grabowski's number as scientific truth.[15] Grabowski did not accept Berendt's statements about Datner's research, saying instead 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 corroborated Datner's numbers.[16]

Historian Bogdan Musial, in his review of the 2011 book, listed what he considered to be flaws and problems. Musial wrote that Grabowski had made mistakes that were sometimes easy to catch even for a casual reader. Musial noted that the book did not contain many sources. According to Musial, Grabowski either shunned the literature on the subject or was not familiar with it. Musial also criticized the use of trial transcripts to generalize attitudes about Jews to the local population. Additionally, the book lacked witness statements from Polish inhabitants, archives from the regional Polish resistance, and German statements. He wrote that Grabowski ignored the hard economic conditions and the deportations of Poles from the described area, which Musial believed must have colored attitudes among the Poles. Musial noted that, while Grabowski wrote extensively about antisemitic agitation before the war, the Germans' antisemitic campaign received a mere three sentences. According to Musial, Grabowski lowered the number of Jewish survivors, while inflating the number of Poles complicit in German crimes. In his critique, Musial wrote that Grabowski never questioned statements from Jewish witnesess, while being highly critical of statements made by Poles.[17] Grabowski rejected Musial's critique, writing that it was an attempt to disparage serious historical research on the basis of its subject matter and conclusions and that it failed to address the quality of the research methodology.[18]

Shimon Redlich, in his review, criticized 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 betrayed emotional involvement. However, Redlich said the book "should become required reading for scholars and students of Polish-Jewish relations".[19]

Krystyna Samsonowska, a historian at Jagiellonian University and a 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, in not even trying to contact the families of Jews who survived the German occupation in Dąbrowa Tarnowska, or the Poles who hid them. By using broader sources, Samsonowska claimed to have identified by name 90 Jews who had survived the war by hiding in Dąbrowa County, as opposed to the 38 figure given by Grabowski. Samsonowska noted that the number of survivors was probably much higher. She also noted that Grabowski had understated by half the number of Polish Righteous among the Nations from Dąbrowa County who had been honored by Yad Vashem for helping Jews.[20]

Łukasz Męczykowski, in a histmag.org review of the 2011 book, wrote that, while some historians try to seek truth calmly and impartially, others prefer passing condemnatory judgments, and Grabowski had chosen the latter path: Grabowski was largely focused on finding those who were supposedly guilty of collaboration, and was averse to acknowledging those who had showed commendable behavior. Męczykowski noted that Grabowski incorrectly accused Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) of trying to inflate the number of Polish citizens who helped Jews. Męczykowski wrote that Grabowski had contradicted himself on certain points. Also that Grabowski, in calling upon Poles to admit their guilt, seemed unaware that there had 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.[21]

Samuel Kassow, in a review essay in Yad Vashem Studies, wrote, of Grabowski's book and those of three other scholars (Alina Skibinska, Barbara Engelking, and Dariusz Libionka), that they "are a historical achievement of the first order." He described 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 called 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, found Grabowski's work to be outstanding and firmly grounded in solid research.[24]

Michael Fleming's review commended 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][12][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. 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][12]

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][19]
  • (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

  1. ^ a b c d e f g Ofer Aderet, "'Orgy of Murder': The Poles Who 'Hunted' Jews and Turned Them Over to the Nazis", Ha'aretz, 11 February 2017.
  2. ^ Snyder, Donald (21 Jan 2015). "The Summer Polish Jews Were Hunted". The Forward.
  3. ^ Lough, Shannon (26 Feb 2014). "Twenty-five years since the fall of communism in Poland (interview)".
  4. ^ "Fellow Dr. Jan Grabowski". USHMM website.
  5. ^ Grabowski, Jan (2 May 2017). "The Polish Police Collaboration in the Holocaust" (PDF).
  6. ^ Poland’s dark hunt, macleans, 7 Oct 2013
  7. ^ a b Holocaust writer Grabowski faces Polish fury, Jewish Chronicle, 18 Oct. 2013.
  8. ^ "Hunt for the Jews snags Yad Vashem book prize", Times of Israel (JTA), 8 December 2014.
  9. ^ "Professor Jan Grabowski wins the 2014 Yad Vashem International Book Prize", Yad Vashem, 4 December 2014.
  10. ^ Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War, Emanuel Ringelblum, edited by Joseph Kermish, Shmuel Krakowski, translated by Dafna Allon, Danuta Dabrowska & Dana Keren, 1974 translation of 1944 original, Northwestern University Press, page 135: : The uniformed police has had a deplorable role in the “resettlement actions”. The blood of hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews, caught and driven to the “death vans” will be on their heads. ... In the subsequent “actions,” when the Jewish Order Service was liquidated as well, the Polish Police force was utilized. It was like that in Biala Podlaska, for example, where the Polish Police conducted the extermination “action” against the Jews in October 1942. I heard from an eyewitness of this “action” that the local fire-brigade, jointly with the uniformed police, discovered sixty Jews in the house where my woman informant was staying, herself among them. The uniformed police [usually] maltreated captured Jews terribly. They would hand over captured Jews to the Germans, who would shoot them on the spot. his time, thanks to the large amount of the bribe offered, the captured Jews were not shot but were sent to Miedzyrzec Podlaski, where the remnant of the Jews from Biala Podlaska were being concentrated. This remnant was shortly afterwards sent to Treblinka.
  11. ^ Poland’s dark hunt, Macleans, 7 Oct 2013
  12. ^ a b c Canadian historian joins uproar in Israel over Polish Holocaust law, CBC, 20 Feb. 2018.
  13. ^ Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland, by Jan Grabowski (review), Joshua D. Zimmerman, The Journal of Modern History, vol. 88, no. 1, March 2016.
  14. ^ Himka, John-Paul. "Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland.", East European Jewish Affairs, (2014): 271-273.
  15. ^ Grzegorz Berendt (24 February 2017). ""The Polish People Weren't Tacit Collaborators with Nazi Extermination of Jews" (opinion)". Haaretz.
  16. ^ Jan Grabowski, "No, Poland's Elites Didn't Try to Save the Jews During the Holocaust", Haaretz, 19 March 2017
  17. ^ "Judenjagd – 'umiejętne działanie' czy zbrodnicza perfidia?", Dzieje Najnowsze: kwartalnik poświęcony historii XX wieku, published by the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences, vol. 43, no. 2, 2011.
  18. ^ Rżnięcie nożem po omacku, czyli polemika historyczna a la Bogdan Musiał, Dzieje Najnowsze, Jan Grabowski, 2011
  19. ^ a b Redlich, Shimon, "Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland, by Grabowski, Jan, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2013", Slavic Review, 73.3 (2014), pp. 652-53.
  20. ^ Samsonowska, Krystyna (July 2011). "Dabrowa Tarnowska - nieco inaczej. (Dabrowa Tarnowska - not quite like that)". Więź. 7: 75–85.
  21. ^ "Jan Grabowski – Judenjagd. Polowanie na Żydów 1942-1945" – recenzja [review by] Łukasz Męczykowski [1]
  22. ^ Kassow, Samuel (2013). "Essay review of : Jan Grabowski, Judenjagd, B. Engelking, Jest Taki Piekny Sloneczny dzien and B. Engelking and J. Grabowski, Zarys Krajobrazu". Yad Vashem Studies. v. 41 (1), : 216–217.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
  23. ^ Ray, Larry (Winter 2014). "Review". Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture & History. 20 (3): 204–208.
  24. ^ JAN GRABOWSKI. Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland (review), Rosa Lehmann, The American Historical Review, vol. 121, issue 4 (1 October 2016), pp. 1382–83.
  25. ^ [Jan Grabowski, Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland (review)], Michael Fleming, European History Quarterly, pp. 357-9, April 11, 2016.
  26. ^ a b [2]"Stanowczo sprzeciwiamy się działalności i wypowiedziom Jana Grabowskiego". OŚWIADCZENIE W Polityce.pl
  27. ^ The truth about Poland, Legion Magazine, Stephen J. Thorne, 14 Feb 2018
  28. ^ A Polish Historian's Accounting of the Holocaust Divides His Countrymen, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 25 June 2012
  29. ^ Facing Death Threats for Highlighting Poland's Role in Holocaust, Historians Come to Scholar's Defense, Ha'aretz (AP), 20 June 2017
  30. ^ Holocaust law wields a 'blunt instrument' against Poland's past, BBC, 3 Feb 2018
  31. ^ Historians defend prof who wrote of Poles’ Holocaust complicity, Times of Israel (JTA), 13 June 2017
  32. ^ International historians defend Ottawa scholar who studies Poland and Holocaust, Vanessa Gera, The Associated Press, 20 June 2017
  33. ^ "Poland's Dueling Holocaust Monuments to 'Righteous Gentiles' Spark Painful Debate", Forward, 27 April 2014.
  34. ^ "Poland Plans Monument to Righteous Gentiles on Site of Warsaw Ghetto", Forward, 17 April 2013.
  35. ^ "Polish Museum Honoring Poles Who Saved Jews Arouses Controversy", Haaretz, 22 March 2016.
  36. ^ POLISH HISTORIAN: PENALTIES FOR NEW POLISH LAW RESEMBLE PRE-WAR PUNISHMENT, 20 Feb. 2018, Jerusalem Post.
  37. ^ Polish Historian: Entering Dialogue With Poland on Holocaust Bill Is 'The Last Thing' Israel Should Do, Haaretz, 19 Feb. 2018
  38. ^ a b c d e f Jan Grabowski at Polish Center for Holocaust Research
  39. ^ From Rupert's Land to Canada, By John Elgin Foster, R. C. Macleod, Theodore Binnema, page xxx
  40. ^ Jak Polska długa i szeroka (interview), Wyborcza, 10 Jan 2011
  41. ^ Alltag im Holocaust: Jüdisches Leben im Großdeutschen Reich 1941-1945, edited by Andrea Löw, Doris L. Bergen, Anna Hájková, page 6
  42. ^ ZARYS KRAJOBRAZU. WIEŚ POLSKA WOBEC ZAGŁADY ŻYDÓW 1942-1945, The Union of Jewish Communities in Poland, Katarzyna Markusz, 23 Nov 2011
  43. ^ FORECKI: NASZE MIENIE „POŻYDOWSKIE”, Krytyka Polityczna, Piotr Forecki, 14 December 2014

External links

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