Jan Grabowski

The Polish League Against Defamation, a group whose stated aim is to protect "Poland's good name", funded a civil case against Grabowski and Engelking in Poland, brought by the 81-year-old niece of a Polish villager who was accused in the book by witness testimony of having betrayed Jews to the Germans. In February 2021, a Warsaw court ruled that Grabowski and Engelking must apologize for their claims about the villager, but it did not order them to pay compensation. In response to the court ruling, the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Yad Vashem, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center released statements expressing their concerns about the ruling's effects on academic freedom and freedom of speech. The POLIN Museum stated that the suit had been "an attempt to frighten scholars away from publishing the results of their research out of fear of a lawsuit and the ensuing costly litigation."

In August 2021, an appeals court overturned that ruling and dismissed the claims against the historians.

In 2018 Grabowski and Barbara Engelking co-edited a two-volume study, Dalej jest noc: losy Żydów w wybranych powiatach okupowanej Polski (Night without End: The Fates of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland). Published by the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, the study focused on nine counties in German-occupied Poland during the Holocaust, giving a detailed account of the fate of the area's Jews and of the question of Polish collaboration with the German occupiers. Grabowski contributed a chapter on Węgrów County. He told a newspaper that the work "talks about Polish virtue just as much. It paints a truthful picture."

Grabowski co-wrote a Haaretz opinion piece in December 2018 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 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.

Grabowski's book The Polish Police: Collaboration in the Holocaust (2017), published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, is based on his 2016 Ina Levine Annual Lecture on the Blue Police.

In July 2017, Grabowski criticized the Ulma-Family Museum of Poles Who Saved Jews in World War II, which opened in Markowa 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.

On 7 June 2017 the Polish League Against Defamation released a statement signed by 134 Polish scientists protesting Grabowski's "false and wrongful image of Poland and Polish people". The statement was sent to the University of Ottawa and to the publishers of his books and articles. It referred to German efforts to exterminate the Polish population, which made its occupation of Poland different from western Europe's occupation; to numerous examples of Poles' assistance to Jews; and to Poland's international protests at the plight of the Jewish population. It alleged that assistance by Poles was often hindered by Jews' low proficiency in Polish, by mistrust created by Jews' affiliation with Soviet authorities, and by Orthodox Jews' mistrust of non-Jews.

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, Doris Bergen, Randolph L. Braham, Richard Breitman, Christopher Browning, Deborah Dwork, Michael Fleming, Mary Fulbrook, Christian Gerlach, Peter Hayes, Deborah Lipstadt, Antony Polonsky, Dina Porat, Alvin H. Rosenfeld and Robert Jan van Pelt. Grabowski filed a lawsuit in Warsaw against the Polish League Against Defamation in November 2018. The suit asked that each of the 134 Polish scientists who signed the 2017 statement buy a copy of Dalej jest noc and donate it to a Polish high school.

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.

Poland's embassy in Ottawa criticized Grabowski in 2016 for "groundless opinions and accusations" after he wrote an 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".

Awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize in 2014, the book describes the Judenjagd (German: "Jew hunt") from 1942 onwards, focusing on 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 Polish court records from the 1940s, post-war testimony collected by the Central Committee of Polish Jews, and records gathered in Germany during investigations in the 1960s. In a 2015 interview, he described the mechanics of the "hunt":

Grabowski is best known for his book Hunt for the Jews, first published in Poland in 2011 as Judenjagd: Polowanie na Żydów 1942–1945. In 2013 a revised and updated 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.

Co-founder in 2003 of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, in Warsaw, Poland, Grabowski is best known for his book Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland (2013), which won the Yad Vashem International Book Prize.

Grabowski became a faculty member at the University of Ottawa in 1993. 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". He received a grant for the project (2016–2020) from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

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 the Holocaust in Poland.

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