Forthcoming Issue
JQ257 - May 2024Whitewash:
Poland and the Jews
This issue of The Jewish Quarterly explores the failure of modern Poland to reckon with the nation's role in the Holocaust.
In this ground-breaking essay, Jan Grabowski, a world-renowned Holocaust historian, examines how the government, museums, schools and state institutions became complicit in delivering a message of Polish national innocence during the Holocaust. He recounts his own experience as the victim of smears and a notorious lawsuit for questioning the complicity of Poles in the destruction of the country's Jews, and examines the far-reaching consequences of Poland's historical distortions, which have been repeated and replicated worldwide to challenge the truth of the Holocaust.
Jan Grabowski is a professor of history at the University of Ottawa. His books include Rescue for Money and Hunt for the Jews, winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize. His most recent book is On Duty: The Role of the Polish Blue and Criminal Police in the Holocaust. He and co-editor Barbara Engelking were sued in Poland for their book, Night Without End, which included their research into Polish collaboration with the Nazis.