Three million Polish Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, wiping out nearly 98 percent of the Jewish population who had lived and thrived there for generations. Night Without End tells the stories of their resistance, suffering, and death in unflinching, horrific detail. Based on meticulous research from across Poland, it concludes that those who were responsible for so many deaths included a not insignificant number of Polish villagers and townspeople who aided the Germans in locating and slaughtering Jews. When these findings were first published in a Polish edition in 2018, a storm of protest and lawsuits erupted from Holocaust deniers and from people who claimed the research was falsified and smeared the national character of the Polish people. Night Without End, translated and published for the first time in English in association with Yad Vashem, presents the critical facts, significant findings, and the unmistakable evidence of Polish collaboration in the genocide of Jews.
JAN GRABOWSKI is Professor in the Department of History at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland (IUP, 2013), which was awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize. BARBARA ENGELKING is the founder and director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw. Her books include Holocaust and Memory: The Experience of the Holocaust and its Consequences, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, and Such a Beautiful Sunny Day: Jews Seeking Refuge in the Polish Countryside, 1942–1945 (published 2016 by Yad Vashem).
“Night Without End marks a turning point in scholarship on the Holocaust in Poland. Drilling down on the role of the local population in the Judeocide, Night Without End sheds bright light on key questions long taboo in Polish society and elided by historians. Bold and innovative, it opens our lens on Jews’ struggle for survival through the trajectories of individuals, showing how their neighbors greatly increased or substantially diminished their chances of survival.” —DEBÓRAH DWORK, Graduate Center— City University of New York; “This remarkable volume includes a series of detailed local studies of the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland by a group of outstanding scholars. Altogether, Night without End provides an unprecedented reconstruction of the daily reality of genocide, meticulously demonstrating the extent of local Polish participation in hunting down and murdering their Jewish neighbors. This shocking book is an indispensable addition to the scholarship on the Holocaust and to our understanding of the social dynamic of genocide.” —OMER BARTOV, author of Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz; “Grabowski and Engelking belong to the small group of founders of the New Polish School of Research on the Holocaust. Their work has revolutionized historiography of the Holocaust in Poland and beyond. Night without End shows well the meticulous quality of their scholarship and the openness with which they confront the subject of complicity of the local population in the persecution of Jews during the German occupation of Poland.” —JAN T. GROSS, Princeton University
