Jan Grabowski

Settled Natives and French in Montréal 1667–1760''.

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.

His father, Zbigniew Ryszard Grabowski né Abrahamer, a Holocaust survivor and chemistry professor from Kraków, fought in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.

Jan Zbigniew Grabowski (born June 24, 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.

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 after 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."

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

He received his Ph.D. from the Université de Montréal in 1994 for a thesis entitled ''The Common Ground.

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 was born in Warsaw to a Roman Catholic mother and Jewish father.

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.

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.

In a 2015 interview, he described the mechanics of the "hunt":

"The German policy was based on terror. Poles faced the death penalty for any help they gave to Jews. Also, the Germans created a so-called 'hostage' system among the Poles. In every community they designated people who would be rotated every couple of weeks. They were responsible for informing the Polish police, or the Germans, about Jews hiding in their towns. If a Jew was discovered that had not been reported, the so-called hostages would be harshly punished. So everyone was highly motivated to get rid of the Jews."

According to Grabowski, most Jews in hiding were given up by local people to the Polish Blue Police or directly to the Germans.

He said that Poles were "directly or indirectly" responsible for most of the deaths of over 200,000 Jews, not counting victims of the police; he explained that by "most", it could be 60 percent or as high as 90 percent.

The book sparked a heated public debate in 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".

He received a grant for the project (2016–2020) from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

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.

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 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."

Mark Weitzman, director of government affairs for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said it was "meticulously researched and sourced".

Polish historian Jacek Chrobaczyński commended its authors for deconstructing political myths that persist in Polish history, journalism, church, and politics.

However, scholars associated with Poland's Institute of National Remembrance alleged that the study used unreliable sources, selectively treated witness statements, presented rumor as fact, and underestimated the draconian nature of the German occupation.

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 the ruling against Grabowski and Engelking, arguing in favour of academic freedom.

In 2023, Grabowski, along with historian Shira Klein, published an article in the Journal of Holocaust Research which stated that Wikipedia spread misinformation about the history of Jews in Poland due to the work of a small group of editors.

Grabowski said "as a historian, I was aware for a long time of various distortions of the history of the Holocaust on Wikipedia. What I found shocking, was the sheer scale of the phenomenon, its lasting character and the small number of individuals needed to distort the history of one of the greatest tragedies in the history of humanity."