Andrew Kornbluth, ""We Are Shocked by the Terribly Unfair Verdict": A Letter from Toronto, the Holocaust, and the Limits of Postwar Justice in Poland"
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Roz and Ralph Halbert Lecture in Jewish Studies
Andrew Kornbluth (University of California, Berkley)
"We Are Shocked by the Terribly Unfair Verdict": A Letter from Toronto, the Holocaust, and the Limits of Postwar Justice in Poland
The records of postwar trials in Poland for crimes against Jews have been the source of major revelations about the Holocaust for the last 25 years. But what did the trials themselves accomplish? Neither an anti-Semitic whitewash nor a Soviet set-up, the so-called "August Trials" are revealed to have been a surprisingly complex process in which a Stalinist government, vengeful public, and professional judiciary struggled to account for popular participation in mass murder.
Andrew Kornbluth is a Research Fellow with the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His book, "The August Trials: The Holocaust and Postwar Justice in Poland" (Harvard University Press, 2021) received the Reginald Zelnik Book Prize of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, the Baron Book Prize of the American Academy for Jewish Research, and the Ernst Fraenkel Prize of the Wiener Holocaust Library.