The Hugo Valentin Lecture 2024: Professor Jan Grabowski

The twenty-first Hugo valentin lecture will be given by Professor Jan Grabowski.

His research has been published in monographs such as *Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-occupied Poland* (2013) and *The Polish Police: Collaboration in the Holocaust* (2017). In recent years, Professor Grabowski has devoted a significant part of his time to research on Holocaust memory and denial.

Although Holocaust denial was once common, states, institutions, and individuals today rarely question the Jewish catastrophe as a historical fact. Instead, they accept that six million European Jews were murdered by the Germans. However, they refuse to acknowledge that their own people, their nation, participated in the German genocidal project. This is particularly true in today’s Poland, where the distortion of history has almost become official state policy. During the lecture, Professor Grabowski will highlight how this policy has gained extensive support in Polish society and contributed to a gradual reinterpretation of one of the greatest tragedies in European history into a myth of the Polish nation’s freedom from historical guilt.

Jan Grabowski is a professor of history at the University of Ottawa. He has worked as a visiting researcher at institutions including Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich, the University of Leiden, and Hebrew University. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and was appointed an honorary doctor at Lund University in 2024.