Jan Gross: career path of a Holocaust historian in Poland

Jan Tomasz Gross's research focuses on modern Europe, concentrating on a comparative approach to totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, Soviet and Eastern European politics, and the Shoah.

Having grown up in Poland and begun his studies at the University of Warsaw, he emigrated to the United States in 1969 and obtained his doctorate in sociology from Yale University (1975). His first book, Polish Society under German Occupation, was published in 1979. Neighbors (2001; French translation: Les voisins, 2002) recounts the events that took place in July 1941 in the small Polish town of Jedwabne, during which almost all the Jewish inhabitants of the city were killed in a single day. By using direct testimony, Jan Tomasz Gross demonstrates that the Jews of Jedwabne were killed by their Polish neighbours, and not by the German occupiers, as had been claimed before. This story led to an unprecedented reassessment of Jewish-Polish relations during the Second World War and led to heated debates.

After dealing with anti-Semitism in Poland following the 1945 events (Fear, 2006; French translation: La peur, 2010), he published in 2011 a book on looting against Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe (French translation: Moisson d'or: le pillage des biens juifs, 2014).