The history and memory of World War II and the destruction of the majority of European Jews on Polish soil have run on separate tracks: the history of World War II and the Holocaust. Samuel Kassow and Piotr Wróbel will focus their conversation on the contested issues in the Polish Jewish relations of this period, and the problem of distinct historical memories this period evokes among Jews and Poles.

About the Speakers

Samuel Kassow is the Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, and is recognized as one of the world's leading scholars on the Holocaust and the Jews of Poland. Kassow was born in 1946 in a DP-camp in Stuttgart, Germany and grew up speaking Yiddish. Kassow attended the London School of Economics and Princeton University where he earned a PhD in 1976 with a study about students and professors in Tsarist Russia. He is widely known for his 2007 book, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Indiana University Press). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research, has won numerous awards, and has lectured widely.

Piotr Wróbel is Konstanty Reynert Chair of Polish History at the University of Toronto. His current research focuses on national minorities in East Europe. He is the author or co-author of seven books and more than 75 articles about Polish, German, Byelorussian, and Jewish history published in Poland, Great Britain, and the United States. The titles of his current projects are “History of the Jews in Poland ”. In 2006, he co-edited Nation and History: Polish Historians from the Enlightenment to the Second World War.