Jan Grabowski

In a later, 17 March 2018 Gazeta Wyborcza interview, Grabowski said he believed 200,000 Jews died while hiding. Although he was unable to determine the exact percentage of that number who perished directly or indirectly due to acts by Poles, he believed it to be between 60% and 90%.

In 2018 Grabowski and Barbara Engelking co-edited a two-volume study, Dalej jest noc: losy Żydów w wybranych powiatach okupowanej Polski (Night Continues: The Fates of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland). Grabowski himself contributed a chapter about Węgrów County (which during World War II was part of a greater German Sokolow Kreishauptmannschaft). The book was criticized for using unreliable sources, for ignoring the draconian nature of the German occupation, for some authors' alleged personal interests, for selective treatment of witness statements (scrutinizing Polish witness statements, while taking at face value witness statements which accorded with authors' theses), and for presenting rumors or gossip as actual proven events. Grabowski and his co-authors requested that their responses to the criticisms be published in the Bulletin of the Institute of National Remembrance and in Polish-Jewish Studies. Historian Jacek Chrobaczyński wrote that all nine of the book's sections were prepared with the same methodology and style, and he commended the authors for deconstructing political myths and propaganda that partly still persist in Polish history, journalism, church, and politics.

In February 2018, Grabowski called the Polish government "undemocratic" and "nationalistic" and said that the alleged antisemitism in Poland resembled "the Dark Ages". He called on Israel to refuse dialogue with Poland about the Holocaust until Poland had engaged in "internal discussion". (In March 2018, an official Polish delegation working for dialogue with Israel went there, including the well-known conservative journalist Bronislaw Wildstein.)

In December 2018 Grabowski co-wrote a Haaretz opinion piece criticizing Israeli historian Daniel Blatman, professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for accepting the post of chief historian at the newly-formed Warsaw Ghetto Museum, in Warsaw, Poland, and thus agreeing to be "the poster boy of [Polish] state authorities bent on turning back the clock and distorting the history of the Holocaust". In January 2019 Blatman responded in Haaretz that, while scholars at the Center for Holocaust Research had provided some valuable insights into involvement in the Holocaust by parts of the Polish population, they did not give due weight to the terror and violence perpetrated by the Germans against Poles under German occupation.

"The great majority of Jews in hiding", according to Grabowski in an 11 February 2017 Haaretz interview, "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." In the same interview, Grabowski said that Poles were responsible for the deaths, "directly or indirectly", of "more than 200,000 Jews" during the Holocaust, and that this was a conservative estimate because it excluded victims of the Blue Police.

On 7 June 2017 the Polish League Against Defamation released a statement signed by 134 Polish scholars and scientists protesting Grabowski's work.

On 10 June 2017, the Polish Center for Holocaust Research issued a statement "In defence of Jan Grabowski's good name". Signed by seven of its members, including Barbara Engelking, Jacek Leociak and Dariusz Libionka, it called the criticism from the Polish League Against Defamation "as brutal as it is absurd", and stated that none of the 134 signatories was a Holocaust historian. The Human Rights Research and Education Centre at the University of Ottawa also expressed its full support for Grabowski, referring to his "highly respected scholarship".

On 19 June 2017, some 180 Holocaust historians and other historians of modern European history signed an open letter in Grabowski's defence, addressed to Calin Rovinescu, Chancellor of the University of Ottawa. Describing the campaign against Grabowski as "an attack on academic freedom and integrity", the letter said that "[h]is scholarship holds to the highest standards of academic research and publication", and that the Polish League Against Defamation puts forth a "distorted and whitewashed version of the history of Poland during the Holocaust era". Signatories included Yitzhak Arad, Omer Bartov, Yehuda Bauer, Michael Berenbaum, Randolph L. Braham, Richard Breitman, Christopher Browning, Deborah Dwork, Michael Fleming, Christian Gerlach, Peter Hayes, Deborah Lipstadt, Antony Polonsky, Dina Porat, Alvin H. Rosenfeld and Robert Jan van Pelt.

In July 2017 Grabowski criticized the Ulma-Family Museum of Poles Who Saved Jews in World War II, in Markowa, which opened in 2016. The garden will have plaques identifying the 1,500 towns in which the nearly 6,700 Poles lived who helped Jews and were recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations. In Grabowski's view, the museum should provide more information about the Polish neighbours of the Ulma family and others who aided Jews. Arguing that the number of Poles recognized by Yad Vashem is not representative of the Polish population, and that those who did help Jews feared their neighbours, Grabowski believes that Polish authorities are using the museum to suggest that the "rescue of Jews was widespread in occupied Poland".

In 2016–17 he was an Ina Levine Invitational Scholar at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he conducted research into the Polish Blue Police for a project entitled "Polish 'Blue' Police, Bystanders, and the Holocaust in Occupied Poland, 1939–1945". Grabowski received a grant for the project (2016–2020) from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Reviewing the book in April 2016, Michael Fleming, a British historian specializing in Polish history, wrote in support of Grabowski, describing criticisms of the book as attempts to "reinstitute the old, discredited heroic narrative of unimpeachable Polish conduct". Arguing that these tales of heroism are common in Europe, he wrote that Grabowski's book is part of a "growing body of corrective scholarship" that discusses the indifference or complicity of European populations; but he also warned readers and reviewers not to "reinforce orientalist narratives about 'Eastern' Europe" or the idea that only populations close to the genocide could stop it, which he calls "fetishiz[ing] spatial proximity".

In 2017 Grabowski published The Polish Police: Collaboration in the Holocaust, the Ina Levine Annual Lecture delivered on 17 November 2016 at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C, on the Polish Blue Police.

In 2016 Grabowski published a paper criticizing what he called "the history policy of the Polish state", and arguing that "the state-sponsored version of history seeks to undo the findings of the last few decades and to forcibly introduce a sanitized, feel-good narrative". He 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 inflate the role of the rescuers, whom he describes as a "desperate, hunted, tiny minority", the exception to the rule. The ghetto site should be dedicated, he argues, to Jewish suffering, not to Polish courage.

In 2016, Grabowski wrote a critical article for Maclean's about Poland's controversial amendment to its Act on the Institute of National Remembrance. The amendment would have penalized, with imprisonment for up to three years, anyone defaming Poland by accusing it of complicity in the Holocaust, with exceptions for "freedom of research, discussion of history, and artistic activity". In 2018 Grabowski compared the amendment to a pre-1939 Polish law that likewise stipulated punishment for defaming Poland. He told Haaretz that the Holocaust in Poland was "not only a German-Jewish affair": "The assumption that the extermination occurred in outer space, that the Holocaust happened without Polish society becoming aware of this unfortunate event, is simply absolutely false. ... There are no Polish bystanders in the Holocaust."

Awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize in 2014, the book describes the Judenjagd (German: "Jew hunt") from 1942 onwards, focusing on alleged Dąbrowa Tarnowska County, a rural area in southeastern Poland. The Judenjagd was the German search for Jews who had escaped from the liquidated ghettos in Poland and were trying to hide among the non-Jewish population. Grabowski relied on court records from the 1940s in Poland, testimony collected after the war by the Central Committee of Polish Jews, and records gathered by the German justice system during investigations in the 1960s.

Grabowski is best known for his book Hunt for the Jews, first published in Poland in 2011 as Judenjagd: Polowanie na Zydow 1942–1945. In 2013 a revised and updated English-language edition was published by Indiana University Press as Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland, and in 2016 a revised and expanded edition was published in Hebrew by Yad Vashem.

The book sparked a heated public debate, particularly when first published in Poland in 2011. Grabowski received death threats. When a German newspaper reviewed the book favourably in 2015, a right-wing Polish website, Fronda.pl [pl] , ran a piece with the headline, "Sieg Heil, Mr. Grabowski", accompanied by a photograph of Joseph Goebbels; Grabowski successfully sued the website's owner for libel.

Co-founder in 2003 of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, in Warsaw, Poland, Grabowski achieved broad attention with his 2013 book Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland, which won the Yad Vashem International Book Prize.

In 1993 Grabowski became a faculty member at the University of Ottawa.

While at the University of Warsaw, Grabowski was active in the Independent Students' Union between 1981 and 1985, where he helped to run an underground printing press for the Solidarity movement. He received his M.A. in 1986, and in 1988 he emigrated to Canada. Travel restrictions had been eased by Poland's communist government. If he had known the regime would fall a year later, he would have stayed, he told an interviewer: "When I left in 1988 I thought there was no future for any young person in Poland. It felt like you were looking at the world through a thick wall of glass. It was sort of an un-reality ... the rules were oblique, strange, inhuman even. Then after one year the system seemed to collapse like a house of cards." He received his Ph.D. from the Université de Montréal in 1994 for a thesis entitled The Common Ground. Settled Natives and French in Montréal 1667–1760.

Jan Grabowski (born 1962) is a Polish-Canadian professor of history at the University of Ottawa, specializing in Jewish–Polish relations in German-occupied Poland during World War II, and in the Holocaust in Poland.

Grabowski was born in Warsaw, Poland, to a Roman Catholic mother and Jewish father. His father, Zbigniew Grabowski [pl] , a Holocaust survivor and chemistry professor from Kraków, fought in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.