Politics and the Holocaust in Modern Poland: A seminar with Prof. Edyta Gawron
On Monday, April 24 the Austria Centre Leiden and the Leiden Jewish Studies Association hosted a special seminar with Prof. Edyta Gawron entitled “Politics and the Holocaust in Modern Poland.” Gawron is a historian and professor of Jewish Studies at Jagiellonian University in Kraków and a noted expert on the Holocaust and the memory of that event in Poland.
Fifteen students and colleagues joined the event which unpacked the Cleveringa lectures of Professors Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking and explored how the Holocaust continues to be politicized in Poland and what this politicization means for both the memory and history of the Holocaust and the Second World War more generally.
International Studies B.A. student (and former Religious Studies B.A. student) Anneke Romijnders attended the event “to hear (about) the daily experiences of a Holocaust researcher. Research on the Holocaust has become a tense topic in many countries…and (Romijnders) wondered what obstacles current researchers face” in Poland. Overall, Romijnders was impressed with Gawron’s “overview of the pressures under which Holocaust researchers in Poland have to operate.” Gawron “painted a picture not only of government obstruction, but also of the difficulty of reaching and educating a wider audience.”
Religious Studies M.A. Student Joep Rovers was equally impressed. Gawron’s “excellent use of a number of well-selected examples of material culture and interactions between government and other organisations, like museums, serve to illustrate how entwined historical awareness is with the public culture of Poland.” By showing how “various exhibitions in museums were altered to suit the modern vision of politicians in Poland, to the dismay of some academics(but not others) as well as the explanation about the long standing tradition of Poland to have both official and unofficial ceremonies” dedicated to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Gawron “illustrate(d) the proximity of Polish politics to the events of the Holocaust.” Thanks to Gawron’s seminar, Rovers could see that “the Holocaust is simultaneously a topic of both deeply personal and academic debate as well as a political tool used in post-war state building” which “makes for a slew of confounding issues, contradictions and frictions.”
