Day of Remembrance speaker assails whitewash of Holocaust

This year’s featured speaker for the annual Day of Remembrance on April 18 is Dr. Jan Grabowksi, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a professor at the University of Ottawa who specializes in Jewish-Polish relations in German-occupied Poland during World War II.

His presentation is free and open to the public from, 7-9 p.m. at the Atlantis Casino Resort Spa in Reno. Registration is required, however, at https://bit.ly/holocaust23.

The Days of Remembrance, which is observed every year in April and May, is a week-long commemoration of the Holocaust, a state-sponsored persecution and murder of 6 million Jews by Nazi rulers, allies and collaborators.

Grabowksi’s presentation is “Day of Remembrance 2023: Denial. How Activities, Politicians and Educators are Trying to Rewrite the History of the Holocaust.” His talk centers on the “so-called” Holocaust distortion, an insidious as well as dangerous form of Holocaust denial that’s recently become a clear threat to educators, researchers and those interested in the history of the Shoah.

According to Grabowski, people and institutions involved in distortion claim that their nation, people, group has nothing to do with the murders against a race of people.

“Holocaust has become a quasi-official policy of the state, and the enormous resources from state budget are now being deployed in order to write ‘alternative’ history of the Holocaust,” he said.

Grabowski is also co-founder of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw, Poland.

Grabowski said his presentation looks at the problem in Poland as well as in other countries as leaders tend to have the information whitewashed from historical accounts. Grabowski and Barbara Engelking, a Polish sociologist specializing in Holocaust studies, are fighting a court ruling in Poland that found them guilty of defaming a long-deceased Polish village official who turned in Jews’ names to the Nazis.