Ewa Kurek (also Ewa Kurek-Lesik; born 1951) is a Polish historian specializing in Polish-Jewish history during World War II. She has been associated with the far-right, and her revisionist views regarding the Holocaust in Poland have been widely categorized as indicative of antisemitism and Holocaust denial. [1] [2] [3] [4]
From 1971 to 1977, Ewa Kurek studied history at the Catholic University of Lublin, gaining a master's degree in 1979 and later a Ph.D. from the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin on the rescue of Jews by Polish nuns under the supervision of Władysław Bartoszewski. [5] [2] She edited the underground NSZZ Solidarność FSC Information Bulletin in Lublin and collaborated with the underground Spotkania and with Polish and American scholars and press. She has been a lecturer at the Humanities-Economy Academy in Łódź and at the Higher School of Learning in Kielce . [6]
In 1995, Kurek published Zaporczycy, 1943-1949 about the "cursed soldiers". The family of one of the subjects objected to the accuracy of his alleged links with the communist security apparatus, and filed a suit — consequently, the second edition dropped pertinent fragments. [5]
In 1997, Kurek published an English translation of her dissertation thesis —Your Life Is Worth Mine: How Polish Nuns Saved Hundreds of Jewish Children in German-Occupied Poland, 1939-1945 — from Hippocrene Books; it carried an introduction by Jan Karski. [7] Barbara Tepa Lupack, found her account "compelling and historically significant" but took issue with her analysis; Kurek "oversimplified both the nuns' attitudes towards their Jewish charges and the Polish Jews' attitudes towards their own impending doom." [8]
In 2001, she expanded on her dissertation and published Dzieci żydowskie w klasztorach. Udział żeńskich 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 and 1945). [9] Joanna Michlic, a historian specializing in Polish-Jewish history and the Holocaust, noted Kurek's chapter on the postwar recovery of the children to offer a "rather biased perspective colored by anti-Jewish prejudices" — she implied that the Jewish children would have been "better off" had they been left in the hands of Polish convents and families, and blamed Jewish organizations and individuals for traumatic changes in the children's lives, rather than the war and the genocidal destruction of Jewish families. [9] Her assumptions were questionable from historical as well as moral points of view. [9]
In 2006, Kurek submitted her habilitation dissertation titled Poza granicą solidarności: Stosunki polsko-żydowskie, 1939–1945 ("Beyond the Border of Solidarity: Polish-Jewish relations, 1939-1945") to John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin but was summarily rejected. [5] It was published by Kielcke in 2006. [10]
Michlic finds the work to present Jewish-Polish relations as a conflict between incompatible civilizations. [10] Kurek's interpretation of ghetto development in German-occupied Poland — where she suggested that ghettos "were essentially autonomous Jewish provinces built ... by Polish Jews with the approval of the German occupation authorities", and that the Jews "for the first time in over 2,000 years built their own framework of sovereignty" — was described as "outlandish" by Laurence Weinbaum; he found her work as "another troubling development" in the context of a "conservative clerical culture" and rising anti-semitism that followed the 2005 election of Lech Kaczyński as president. [11]
In 2016, Kurek circulated a petition calling for exhumation of the victims of the Jedwabne pogrom — academics agree that the pogrom was committed by local Poles with active support of the Nazi state apparatus but far-right Polish nationalists challenge the involvement of Poles and deny culpability. [12] [13] A couple of years later, in the aftermath of the Amendment to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance, that penalized any public speech which attributes responsibility for the Holocaust to Poland, Kurek expressed elation about the Poles becoming increasingly aware of the abuse perpetrated upon them by the Jews. [14]
Later, in 2018, across multiple speeches delivered across the United States, she accused Poland's urban Jews of collaborating with Nazis during the Holocaust against Hasidic Jews; days later, she absolved native Poles of any responsibility for the purge of Jews in 1968. [2] In March 2020, she claimed that the 2020 coronavirus pandemic in Europe was a weapon used to replace "Western Christian culture" with Jewish culture, and that Western Europe was controlled by "Jewish conglomerates". [15]
Havi Dreifuss, a historian and head of the Center for Research on the Holocaust in Poland at Yad Vashem, finds Kurek to have distorted Jewish-Polish history in a bid to spread hate. [2] According to David Silberklang, editor-in-chief of Yad Vashem Studies , she might be the only legitimate Holocaust scholar to have become a Holocaust revisionist or distorter later; while David Irving could be considered as a precedent, he lacked the academic credentials. [2] However, both Irving and Berel Lang emphasize that Kurek is not a denialist in the traditional sense; she doesn't deny the genocide but argues rather that the Jews were complicit with the Nazis. [2]
Aleksandra Hadzelek[ who? ] finds Kurek's scholarship to be a representative example of the nationalist developments in Polish politics that had birthed a vigorous one-dimensional emphasis on Polish help to Jews during the War than a nuanced study of the variety of Polish attitudes; this new wave of scholarship primarily depended on singular personal accounts than archival sources. [16] Katka Reszke [ who? ] concurs that Kurek's scholarship exhibit a disingenous cherry-picking of contemporary sources to advocate fringe viewpoints. [2] In 2018, she was scheduled to be awarded by a Polish-American NGO for her work on Jewish history at the Polish consulate in New York; however, following media criticism, including from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the award was withdrawn. [17] [3]
The Jedwabne pogrom was a massacre of Polish Jews in the town of Jedwabne, German-occupied Poland, on 10 July 1941, during World War II and the early stages of the Holocaust. Estimates of the number of victims vary from 300 to 1,600, including women, elderly and children, many of whom were locked in a barn and burnt alive. At least 40 ethnic Poles carried out the killing; their ringleaders decided on it beforehand with Germany's Gestapo, SS security police or SS intelligence and they then cooperated with German military police. According to historian Jan T. Gross, "the undisputed bosses of life and death in Jedwabne were the Germans," who were "the only ones who could decide the fate of the Jews."
Żegota was the Polish Council to Aid Jews with the Government Delegation for Poland, an underground Polish resistance organization, and part of the Polish Underground State, active 1942–45 in German-occupied Poland. Żegota was the successor institution to the Provisional Committee to Aid Jews and was established specifically to save Jews. Poland was the only country in German-occupied Europe where such a government-established and -supported underground organization existed.
Otwock(listen) is a city in east-central Poland, some 23 kilometres (14 mi) southeast of Warsaw, with 44,635 inhabitants (2019). Otwock is a part of the Warsaw Agglomeration. It is situated on the right bank of Vistula River below the mouth of Swider River. Otwock is home to a unique architectural style called Swidermajer.
Irena Stanisława Sendler, also referred to as Irena Sendlerowa in Poland, nom de guerreJolanta, was a Polish humanitarian, social worker, and nurse who served in the Polish Underground Resistance during World War II in German-occupied Warsaw. From October 1943 she was head of the children's section of Żegota, the Polish Council to Aid Jews.
Marek Jan Chodakiewicz is a Polish-American historian specializing in Central European history of the 19th and 20th centuries. He teaches at the Patrick Henry College and at the Institute of World Politics. He has been described as conservative and nationalistic, and his attitude towards minorities has been widely criticized.
Szymon Datner was a Polish historian, Holocaust survivor and underground operative from Białystok, best known for his studies of the Nazi war crimes and events of The Holocaust in the Białystok region. His 1946 Walka i zagłada białostockiego ghetta was one of the first studies of the Białystok Ghetto.
Żydokomuna is an anti-communist and antisemitic canard, or a pejorative stereotype, suggesting that most Jews collaborated with the Soviet Union in importing communism into Poland, or that there was an exclusively Jewish conspiracy to do so. A Polish language term for "Jewish Bolshevism", or more literally "Jewish communism", Żydokomuna is related to the "Jewish world conspiracy" myth.
Richard Conrad Lukas is an American historian and author of books and articles on military, diplomatic, Polish, and Polish-American history. He specializes in the history of Poland during World War II.
The Holocaust in Poland was part of the European-wide Holocaust organized by Nazi Germany and took place in German-occupied Poland. During the genocide, three million Polish Jews were murdered, half of all Jews murdered during the Holocaust.
Anti-Jewish violence in Poland from 1944 to 1946 preceded and followed the end of World War II in Europe and influenced the postwar history of the Jews as well as Polish-Jewish relations. It occurred amid a period of violence and anarchy across the country, caused by lawlessness and anti-communist resistance against the Soviet-backed communist takeover of Poland. The estimated number of Jewish victims varies and ranges up to 2,000. In 2021, Julian Kwiek published the first scientific register of incidents and victims of anti-Jewish violence in Poland in 1944-1947, according to his calculations, the number of victims was at least 1,074 to 1,121. Jews constituted between 2% and 3% of the total number of victims of postwar violence in the country, including the Polish Jews who managed to escape the Holocaust on territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union, and returned after the border changes imposed by the Allies at the Yalta Conference. The incidents ranged from individual attacks to pogroms.
Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland is a book published in 2000 written by Princeton University historian Jan T. Gross exploring the July 1941 Jedwabne massacre committed against Polish Jews by their non-Jewish neighbors in the village of Jedwabne in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Piotr Gontarczyk is a Polish historian with a doctorate in history and political science.
Joanna Beata Michlic is a Polish social and cultural historian specializing in Polish-Jewish history and the Holocaust in Poland. An honorary senior research associate at the Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at University College London (UCL), she focuses in particular on the collective memory of traumatic events, particularly as it relates to gender and childhood.
Polish Jews were the primary victims of the Nazi Germany-organized Holocaust in Poland. Throughout the German occupation of Poland, Jews were rescued from the Holocaust by Polish people, at risk to their lives and the lives of their families. According to Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, Poles were, by nationality, the most numerous persons identified as rescuing Jews during the Holocaust. By January 2022, 7,232 people in Poland have been recognized by the State of Israel as Righteous among the Nations.
The Lublin Ghetto was a World War II ghetto created by Nazi Germany in the city of Lublin on the territory of General Government in occupied Poland. The ghetto inmates were mostly Polish Jews, although a number of Roma were also brought in. Set up in March 1941, the Lublin ghetto was one of the first Nazi-era ghettos slated for liquidation during the deadliest phase of the Holocaust in occupied Poland. Between mid-March and mid-April 1942 over 30,000 Jews were delivered to their deaths in cattle trucks at the Bełżec extermination camp and additional 4,000 at Majdanek.
Radom Ghetto was a Nazi ghetto set up in March 1941 in the city of Radom during the Nazi occupation of Poland, for the purpose of persecution and exploitation of Polish Jews. It was closed off from the outside officially in April 1941. A year and a half later, the liquidation of the ghetto began in August 1942, and ended in July 1944, with approximately 30,000–32,000 victims deported aboard Holocaust trains to their deaths at the Treblinka extermination camp.
Zofia Glazernée Olszakowska and Cypora Zonszajnnée Jabłoń (1915–1942) were two close friends from the prewar Gymnasium of Queen Jadwiga in the city of Siedlce, in the Second Polish Republic. Cypora (Cypa) was a Polish Jew born into an affluent family. Zofia was the daughter of a local Catholic pharmacist in Siedlce. They studied together for their final matura exam, after which the two girls went their separate ways until the Holocaust in occupied Poland.
Joanna Sabina Tokarska-Bakir is a Polish cultural anthropologist, literary scholar, and religious studies scholar. She is a full professor and chair of the ethnic and national relations study at the Polish Academy of Sciences's Institute of Slavic Studies. She specializes in blood libel, historical anthropology and in particular violence, and Holocaust ethnography.
The program of the Polish Law and Justice (PiS) party has chapters on "identity" (tożsamość) and "history policy". The implementation of the PiS history policy consists in promoting, in Poland and internationally, a version of history based on a policy of memory that focuses on protecting the "good name" of the Polish nation.
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