Prof. Anna Landau-Czajka receives 2022 Jan Karski and Pola Nireńska Award

The Jan Karski and Pola Nireńska Award was endowed in 1992 by Jan Karski, the courier of the Polish government-in-exile during World War II, to honor his wife, Pola Nireńska, a dancer, who was the only survivor of her Jewish family during the Holocaust.

The Jan Karski and Pola Nireńska Award Committee - composed of Jonathan Brent (Executive Director of The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research), Monika Krawczyk (director of the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute), Prof. Ewa Geller, Prof. Tadeusz Epsztein and Prof. Andrzej Żbikowski - unanimously chose prof. Anna Landau-Czajka for the laureate for the 2022 award. 

The laureate thanked for the award and recalled the time when, in order to make some extra money, she had began to teach history at school. "When I read the programme and started to tell the students about Shoah, I understood it's not possible to teach about this way," Anna Landau-Czajka said.

"Young people were completely unaware that Jews had ever lived in Poland. Maybe they heard about this fact, but they didn't feel absolutely connection with Jewish minority whatsoever. They were invisible people, who didn't exist, and later were murdered and the situation returned to the starting point: they were still absent" - she added.

"It's hard to feel any loss or empathy under such circumstances. That's why I decided I'm going to write about living Jews - about the community which had existed and lived on this soil - like Shoah was never to come," she explained.

Anna Landau-Czajka is a sociologist and historian and professor at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She focuses on the history of Polish-Jewish relations, the history of women and the social history of the 20th century.

In the years 2003-2006 she was a professor at the Jerzy Giedroyc Higher Academy of Communication and Social Media in Warsaw, and throughout 2006-2011 she was professor and director of the Institute of Sociology of Warsaw University. In 2013-2014, she was the chairman of the Program Committee of the E. Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.

Past Karski Award laureates have included include Eugenia Prokop-Janiec, Jerzy Ficowski, Michał Friedman, Marek Rostworowski, Henryk Grynberg, Ruta Sakowska, Jerzy Tomaszewski, Hanna Krall, Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka, priest Stanisław Musiał, Leszek Hońdo, Michał Jagiełło, Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Jan Jagielski, Joachim S. Russek, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Szymon Rudnicki, Aleksander B. Skotnicki, Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov, Marcin Wodziński, Alina Skibińska and Barbara Engelking, Piotr Matywiecki, Jerzy Malinowski, Ewa Geller, Eleonora Bergman, Tadeusz Epsztein, Bella Szwarcman-Czarnota, Daniel Grinberg, Joanna Lisek, Jan Doktór.