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Holocaust Researcher Who Outraged Poland Has No Regrets
(Ha'aretz) Ofer Aderet - Prof. Barbara Engelking, 61, non-Jewish founder and director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw, was awarded an honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv University on May 18. While the Polish government marked the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in April, presenting a narrative of brotherhood between the Jews and the Poles during the Holocaust and the assistance that the Jewish resistance fighters received from their Polish counterparts, Engelking provided a different view in an April television interview. She said, "The Poles had the potential to become allies of the Jews....People who decided to help Jews really were heroes, but there were very few of them....There was no atmosphere conducive to hiding Jews." Immediately after the interview, Engelking was met with a torrent of criticism from the prime minister and the Polish press. She told Ha'aretz: "I didn't say anything controversial or inaccurate in that interview. All of these things have been known and written about for a long time. I myself wrote on this disappointment that Jews felt toward the Poles in my 1993 doctoral thesis....We need to know and understand our past in order to participate as a mature nation in the life of modern Europe." Her honorary doctorate was awarded for "her courageous determination to counter Holocaust distortion and expose the complexities of Polish-Jewish relations during World War II, regardless of personal cost."