Dr. Ewa Kurek lectures:
“Jews may have viewed the ghetto as an opportunity to gain autonomy from Poles.”
[On the allegedly good situation of Jews in ghettos in occupied Poland]
“We need to know whether 1,600 people were actually murdered there or 16. This is the basis from which we can reconstruct what actually happened.”
[About the pogrom in Jedwabne]
“If we do not take appropriate action, if we do not flood the world with facts based on the results of reliable historical research, if we allow the world to continue to feed on the lies of Jan Tomasz Gross, Engelking, Libionka, and Grabowski, then our children and grandchildren will be working for Jews for decades to come.”
[On the alleged lies of Polish independent historians]
“In 1939-42, Warsaw outside the ghetto “was bleak and sad. It was inhabited by a population that had been brutalized by German roundups, executions, and deportations to concentration camps.” At that time “the Warsaw ghetto (…) was having fun”.
[About the “good conditions of life” in the Warsaw Ghetto]
More Information
Ewa Kurek is a Polish historian and researcher of Polish-Jewish relations, and an anti-communist opposition activist in the 1980s. Her lectures on the Jewish community are often accused of antisemitism.
Moreover, she very often denies the basic historical facts about the fate of Jews or the findings of independent Polish historians about the complicity of some Polish citizens in crimes against Jews.
In 2018, she received an award from a private US-based Polish organization that was to have been presented to her at the Polish Consulate in New York. Following media criticism, the presentation ceremony was cancelled. Some of her public lectures and interviews are titled “How the Jews created a fairytale of Holocaust”.
Given the constitutionally protected right of the “freedom of speech” and “freedom to research”, this type of speech cannot be banned. Ewa Kurek cleverly avoids issues that would fall under the legal definition of Holocaust denial. However, she focuses on presenting the reality during the Shoah in a different way and falsifies the true picture of history.
The response to her actions must be an immediate, public and loud opposition by historians, experts, and journalists to straighten out and highlight her lies and distorting theories concerning Jewish history.
This is very dangerous because of her position as an academic lecturer. She is often invited to right-wing conferences, meetings, and interviews in the ultra-right-wing media. Her opinions not only contradict the historical truth, relativize and diminish the significance of the Holocaust, but also damage the image of the country.
