Hijacking Memory of the Holocaust: From Treblinka, Through Auschwitz to the Warsaw Ghetto


Lecture
Sunday, Jun 12, 2022, 5:30 PM

Jan Grabowski

Hijacking Memory of the Holocaust: From Treblinka, Through Auschwitz to the Warsaw Ghetto

The distortion of the history of the Holocaust has become, over the years, an unstated policy of the agencies of the Polish state and various institutions serving as its proxies. One of the aspects of this policy is an attempt to “de-Judaize” the memory of the event, or to weaken or remove the Jewish presence from the historical account. In Poland, today, it is being done in a variety of ways: shifting focus from Jewish victims to righteous gentiles, or appropriating spaces originally devoted to the Jewish suffering. The process of falsification and distortion of the history of the Shoah is best seen today in places of Jewish memory such as Treblinka, Auschwitz, or the area of the former Warsaw ghetto.

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 on the relations between Jews and Poles during the second world war. His book Hunt for the Jews. Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland (2014) has been awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize.

The event will be held in English