McMartin Memorial Lecture 2025
Sep 30, 2025 — 4:30 p.m. to 6 p.m.
You are warmly invited to attend the McMartin Memorial Lecture 2025, presented by Jan Grabowski, Distinguished University Professor in the Department of History.
Lecture description
Over the years, Holocaust has become a universal benchmark of evil and a point of reference in various 鈥渕emorial battles鈥 which - surprisingly, and significantly - have become more heated and acrimonious the further we are chronologically removed from the event itself. In Eastern Europe (where the vast majority of victims were put to death) the denial and distortion of the memory of the Shoah has been driven by nationalists of different hues. In the West (where the distortion of the Holocaust is also a well-known phenomenon) the main, and most recent, attack on the memory of the Shoah has come from the intellectual and academic Left, which seeks to redress the sins of colonial past.
Jan Grabowski
Distinguished University Professor in the Department of History
Jan Grabowski is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Ottawa, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a doctor honoris causa at Lund University, Sweden. His interests focus on the Holocaust in Poland and, more specifically, on the relations between Jews and Poles during the war. He has authored/co-authored or edited twenty books and published more than eighty articles in learned journals in many languages. Professor Grabowski鈥檚 book: Hunt for the Jews. Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland won the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for 2014. In 2018 he co-edited and co-authored 鈥Dalej jest noc鈥 [鈥楴ight Without End鈥, English edition 2022], a two-volume study of the fate of the Jews in selected counties of occupied Poland. The book triggered an angry reaction of the Polish authorities and resulted in a long civil trial prepared and financed by state-funded, right-wing NGO. Polish state-owned TV and newspapers took part in an unprecedented campaign of hate which accompanied the legal proceedings. In May 2024 Grabowski published 鈥淥n Duty. The Role of the Polish 鈥淏lue鈥 Police in the Holocaust鈥 (Yad Vashem Presses), and in August 2024 鈥淲hitewash. Poland and the Jews鈥 appeared as a special copy of The Jewish Quarterly. The Polish edition of 鈥淲hitewash鈥 has been published in Poland in November 2024, and the second English edition has been released by University of Toronto Press in August 2025.