Barbara Engelking

Barbara Engelking (b. 22 April 1962 in Warsaw) is Polish historian and author who specializes in the history of the Holocaust. She is founder and director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw.

Education and career

Engelking received a Ph.D. in sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences and an M.A. in psychology at the University of Warsaw. She specializes in the history of the Holocaust in Poland and has written numerous publications in various languages.^[1]

She is the founder and director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Since 2014 Engelking is chairwoman of the International Auschwitz Council.

Reception

Historian Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe reviewed Engelking's Such a Beautiful Sunny Day in H-Soz-Kult, writing that her study was an example of noteworthy explorations of the Polish participation in the Holocaust, challenging both the German tendency to neglect non-German perpetrators and the Polish perspective of viewing Poles solely as victims.^[2]

Historian Samuel Kassow, in a review essay in Yad Vashem Studies, wrote of Engelking's work, and three other scholars (Jan Grabowski, Alina Skibinska, and Dariusz Libionka), that they "are a historical achievement of the first order." He described them as undermining "the self-serving myths about Polish-Jewish relations in World War II", and as being works of careful and objective scholarship.^[3]

Selected works

• Holocaust and Memory: The Experience of the Holocaust and its Consequences, Leicester University Press, 2001, edited by Gunnar S. Paulsson.
• Such a Beautiful Sunny Day: Jews Seeking Refuge in the Polish Countryside, 1942–1945, Yad Vashem Publications, 2016
• The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, Yale University Press, 2009 (with Jacek Leociak)

References