The Jan Karski award goes to Prof. Barbara Engelking

, 16 November 2016
On Wednesday, the 11 September 2013, the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw will host an official ceremony of awarding the Jan Karski & Pola Nireńska Prize to Prof. Barbara Engelking. At the meeting, Prof. Engelking will give a lecture entitled ‘Sny jako źródło do badań nad Zagładą’ (Dreams as the source for Holocaust research).

The Award, founded by Prof. Jan Karski in 1992 and administered by the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research in New York, has been presented to authors of  publications about Jewish life in Poland and the contribution of Jews in Polish culture. The winners are selected by a committee consisting of the following people:  Prof. Jerzy Tomaszewski, Prof. Feliks Tych, Prof. Paweł Śpiewak (Director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw) and Dr Jonathan Brent (Director of YIVO Institute for Jewish Research).

Prof. Barbara Engelking is a psychologist and sociologist and the head of the Polish Centre for Holocaust Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She examines the history of the Warsaw Ghetto, German-occupied Warsaw and the Holocaust. In 1993, Engelking obtained her PhD degree in Humanities for her PhD thesis entitled ‘Doświadczenie Holokaustu i jego konsekwencje w relacjach autobiograficznych’, supervised by Prof. Aldona Jawłowska-Konstanciak at the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 2002, Engelking won her post-doctoral degree in sociology (specialization: cultural sociology) at the Polish Academy of Sciences for her dissertation ‘Getto warszawskie. Przewodnik po nieistniejącym mieście’.

Her academic interests revolve around the Holocaust experience in the Survivors’ accounts and the attempt to describe this experience in the light of other available sources (official and private documents, letters, accounts, memoirs) and perspectives (victims, witnesses and offenders). She also researches the history of the Warsaw Ghetto, its everyday life and ordinary life of Nazi-occupied Warsaw as well as challenges and moral dilemmas during the Holocaust.