Ewa Kurek

Ewa Janina Kurek (also Ewa Kurek-Lesik; born 24 November 1951 in Kielce) is a Polish historian specializing in Polish-Jewish history during World War II. She has been associated with the far-right, and her revisionist views regarding the Holocaust in Poland have been widely categorized as indicative of antisemitism and Holocaust denial.

Education and career From 1971 to 1977, Ewa Kurek studied history at the Catholic University of Lublin, gaining a master's degree in 1979 and later a Ph.D. from the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin on the rescue of Jews by Polish nuns under the supervision of Władysław Bartoszewski.

Works

Cursed Soldiers In 1995, Kurek published Zaporczycy, 1943-1949 about the "cursed soldiers". The family of one of the subjects objected to the accuracy of his alleged links with the communist security apparatus, and filed a suit — consequently, the second edition dropped pertinent fragments. Barbara Tepa Lupack, found her account "compelling and historically significant" but took issue with her analysis; Kurek "oversimplified both the nuns' attitudes towards their Jewish charges and the Polish Jews' attitudes towards their own impending doom."

In 2001, she expanded on her dissertation and published Dzieci żydowskie w klasztorach. Udział żeńskich zgromadzeń zakonnych w akcji ratowania dzieci żydowskich w Polsce w latach 1939–1945 (Jewish Children in Convents. The Participation of Nuns' Congregations in the Rescue Operation of Jewish Children in Poland Between 1939 and 1945).

Polish-Jewish Relationship In 2006, Kurek submitted her habilitation dissertation titled Poza granicą solidarności: Stosunki polsko-żydowskie, 1939–1945 ("Beyond the Border of Solidarity: Polish-Jewish relations, 1939-1945") to John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin but was summarily rejected.

Michlic finds the work to present Jewish-Polish relations as a conflict between incompatible civilizations.

Views In 2016, Kurek circulated a petition calling for exhumation of the victims of the Jedwabne pogrom — academics agree that the pogrom was committed by local Poles with active support of the Nazi state apparatus but far-right Polish nationalists challenge the involvement of Poles and deny culpability. A couple of years later, in the aftermath of the Amendment to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance, that penalized any public speech which attributes responsibility for the Holocaust to Poland, Kurek expressed elation about the Poles becoming increasingly aware of the abuse perpetrated upon them by the Jews.

Later, in 2018, across multiple speeches delivered across the United States, she accused Poland's urban Jews of collaborating with Nazis during the Holocaust against Hasidic Jews; days later, she absolved native Poles of any responsibility for the purge of Jews in 1968.

Reception Havi Dreifuss, a historian and head of the Center for Research on the Holocaust in Poland at Yad Vashem, finds Kurek to have distorted Jewish-Polish history in a bid to spread hate. However, both Irving and Berel Lang emphasize that Kurek is not a denialist in the traditional sense; she doesn't deny the genocide but argues rather that the Jews were complicit with the Nazis. Katka Reszke concurs that Kurek's scholarship exhibit a disingenous cherry-picking of contemporary sources to advocate fringe viewpoints.