Knowledge Under Siege | Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in German Occupied Poland

Book Talk Admission: Free This event has been cancelled. We apologize for any inconvenience.

This event is a part of YIVO's series Knowledge Under Siege, which presents recent scholarship from Poland about the Holocaust and antisemitism. Each event features scholars discussing a recent book they worked on.

Night Without End. The Fate of Jews in German Occupied Poland, edited by Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2022).

Jan Grabowski discusses Night Without End, a study focused on the so-called third phase of the Holocaust in Poland. The phase began after the liquidation of the ghettos and continued until the very end of the occupation. The authors of the book look at eight rural counties which, in the summer of 1942, contained a population of more than 110,000 Jews. Less than 2% of them survived the war and close to 70% of those who went into hiding, either perished at the hands of their gentile neighbors, or were turned in by them to the Germans. On the basis of Israeli, Polish, German, US and Russian/Ukrainian archives, the authors study the Jewish struggle for survival, the agency of the local populations, and the German genocidal strategies. The book, which provoked a furious reaction of the Polish nationalist authorities, has now been made available to the English-reading audience through the combined efforts of Yad Vashem and Indiana University Press.

About the Speaker

Jan Grabowski is a Professor of History at the University of Ottawa and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has authored/co-authored or edited twenty books and published more than eighty articles. His book “Hunt for the Jews. Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland” (2013) has been awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for 2014. In 2018 he co-edited and co-authored “Dalej jest noc” [Night Without End], a two-volume study of the wartime fate of Jews in selected counties of occupied Poland. Grabowski’s most recent book is “Na posterunku. Udział polskiej policji granatowej i kryminalnej w Zagładzie Żydów” [On duty. The role of the Polish “blue” police in the Holocaust] (2020). He was appointed the 2021-2022 Cleveringa Chair at Leiden University in Netherlands and in December 2022 he has been awarded the Canadian SSHRC Impact Award for research.