The Annual Zaleski Lecture in Modern Polish History
Timothy Snyder Housum Professor of History, Yale University
Chaired by Grzegorz Ekiert Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University
More than 90% of Poland’s Jewish citizens were murdered under German occupation and by German policy, and Polish Jews constitute an absolute majority of the victims of the Holocaust as a whole. Holocaust historiography, generally based in a narrative of the German 1930s, and often oriented towards issues of discourse and memory, fails to account for the reality and significance of non-German societies and institutions. The new Polish micro-history of the Holocaust, although it has brought major factual breakthroughs about local collaboration and important debates about national responsibility, tends to rest on a non-existent consensus about what caused the Holocaust as a whole, and to reproduce the limitations of national history already apparent in the German case.
Can Polish discussions, fruitful in themselves, help to break the deadlock in Holocaust historiography and build a larger explanation of the Holocaust as a whole?