The twentieth century left behind a painful and complicated legacy of massive trauma, and monstrous crimes. The twenty-first century is following suit. To provide perspective, you need an historian who can combine profound knowledge and understanding of the longer, deeper structural processes of history.
Dr. Edyta Gawron
4 October 2022 – – The twentieth century left behind a painful and complicated legacy of massive trauma, monstrous crimes, radical social engineering, and collective/individual guilt syndromes that needed to be deconstructed. More often than not, the past appears as a devastated landscape full of corpses, dashed illusions, failed myths, betrayed promises, and unprocessed memories.
Now over two decades into the twenty-first century, the century repeats. Not just in Ukraine but in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Haiti, Iraq, Palestine, Somalia, Syria, Yemen – the list seems endless.
But the historical experience of the previous century still fundamentally shapes how we envisage our contemporary world at personal, local, national, continental, and global levels. And so you need an historian, to provide perspective, who can combine profound knowledge and understanding of the longer, deeper structural processes of history.
Such a person is Dr. Edyta Gawron, a historian who works as a Professor in the Institute of Jewish Studies, Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. As a specialist in the 20th century history of Polish Jews and Holocaust studies Dr. Gawron cooperates with various academic institutions and museums in Poland and abroad. She also serves as the president of the Management Board of Galicia of the Jewish Heritage Institute Foundation (Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow). The Galicia Jewish Museum does an incredible job documenting the remnants of Jewish culture and life in Polish Galicia, which used to be very vibrant in this area, and by putting the Holocaust, Jewish culture, genocide and world-wide racism in perspective.
It was at the Museum that the following conversation took place earlier this year, about 1 week into the Ukraine War. We filmed in a room the Museum later turned into a day-care center for Ukrainian refugee children. This interview is part of a film/video/writing project that has been the most challenging of my career. It has been a deep dive into the political uses of dehumanisation, genocide and massacre, with a primary focus on the life of Jacques Semelin, one of the world’s leading authorities on these subjects. For some background on that project, click here.
Professor Gawron and I talked about her career, the Museum, Jewish studies, the Holocaust, Ukraine, genocide and the world today: