Jan Gross
Professor of History, Princeton University

"Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz"

Thursday, 12 April 2007
4:00 p.m.
206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive

Sponsored by:
The Center for European Studies
The Center for German and European Studies
The Center for Russia, East Europe, & Central Asia (CREECA)
The Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies
the Department of History
and the Polish Student Association
with support from the University Lectures Committee

Jan T. Gross is the Norman B. Tomlinson '16 and '48 Professor of War and Society at Princeton University. Professor Gross studies modern Europe, focusing on comparative politics, totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, Soviet and East European politics, and the Holocaust. After growing up in Poland and attending Warsaw University, he immigrated to the United States in 1969 and earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Yale University (1975). Gross has also written extensively on other aspects of post-War Polish life and totalitarianism. His most recent book is Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz, in which he covers the Kielce pogrom and further violence against Jews in post-war Poland.

About the Book: Poland suffered an exceedingly brutal Nazi occupation during the Second World War. Close to five million Polish citizens lost their lives as a result. More than half the casualties were Polish Jews. Thus, the second largest Jewish community in the world–only American Jewry numbered more than the three and a half million Polish Jews at the time–was wiped out. Over 90 percent of its members were killed in the Holocaust. And yet, despite this unprecedented calamity that affected both Jews and non-Jews, Jewish Holocaust survivors returning to their hometowns in Poland after the war experienced widespread hostility, including murder, at the hands of their neighbors. The bloodiest peacetime pogrom in twentieth-century Europe took place in the Polish town of Kielce one year after the war ended, on July 4, 1946.

Jan Gross’s Fear attempts to answer a perplexing question: How was anti-Semitism possible in Poland after the war? At the center of his investigation is a detailed reconstruction of the Kielce pogrom and the reactions it evoked in various milieus of Polish society. How did the Polish Catholic Church, Communist party workers, and intellectuals respond to the spectacle of Jews being murdered by their fellow citizens in a country that had just been liberated from a five-year Nazi occupation?