Holocaust History and Survivor Testimony: 
The Case of the Starachowice Factory Slave Labor Camps

Christopher R. Browning

 Christopher R. Browning was the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill until his retirement in May 2014.  Before taking up this position in the fall of 1999, he taught for 25 years at PacificLutheranUniversity in Tacoma, Washington.

 Browning received his B.A. degree from OberlinCollege in 1967 and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1968 and 1975 respectively.  He is the author of eight books: The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office (1978), Fateful Months:  Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution (1985), Ordinary Men:  Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992), The Path to Genocide (1992), Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (2000), Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony (2003), and The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (2004), and Remembering Survival. Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp (2010).  He is also co-editor of Every Day Lasts a Year: A Jewish Family’s Correspondence from Poland (2007).  

 Browning has served as the J. B. and Maurice Shapiro Senior Scholar (1996) and Ina Levine Senior Scholar (2002-3) at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.  He has been a fellow of the Institutes for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, and on the campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  He has also received Fulbright, Alexander von Humboldt, DAAD, and Woodrow Wilson Foundation fellowships.  He has delivered the George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge University (1999) and the George L. Mosse Lectures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2002), as well as the lectures of the Bertelsmann Visiting Professorship at Mansfield College, Oxford University (2007). He is a three-time recipient of the Jewish National Book Award—Holocaust Category, for Ordinary Men, The Origins of the Final Solution, and Remembering Survival.  For this last book he is also a recipient of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research.  He was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006.

 Browning has served as an expert witness in “war crimes” trials in Australia, Canada, and Great Britain.  He has also served as an expert witness in two “Holocaust denial” cases:  the second Zündel trial in Toronto in 1988 and in David Irving’s libel suit against Deborah Libstadt in London in 2000.

Respondent:  Annamaria Orla-Bukowska

Dr. Annamaria Orla-Bukowska is a social anthropologist in the Institute of Sociology at the JagiellonianUniversity in Krakow. Her general field of research is majority-minority relations but her specialization is Polish Christian-Polish Jewish relations. She teaches extensively not only for various departments of the Jagiellonian but also for the postgraduate programs at the State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau and The Graduate School for Social Research in Warsaw. Among other places, she has guest lectured in the USA, the CzechRepublic, Belgium, Greece, Australia, and Israel.

Dr. Orla-Bukowska was a 1999 Koerner Holocaust Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew & Jewish Studies, a 2004 Yad Vashem Fellow in Jerusalem, and a 2009 Skalny Center Fellow at the University of Rochester. She is the author of a chapter on Polish collective memory in the volume The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (N. Lebow, W. Kansteiner, C. Fogu, Duke University Press, 2006), and the co-editor (with Robert Cherry) of Rethinking Poles and Jews: Troubled Past, Brighter Future (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), the Polish language edition of which was published by Więź in 2008. In 2009, she won a grant from the Polish Ministry of Research and Higher Education for a 3-year study of the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow.

In addition to being a social anthropologist, Dr. Annamaria Orla-Bukowska is also a social activist focusing on interfaith and intercultural dialogue, especially concerning the Shoah. She is associated with NGOs in and outside of Poland. Her labor of love, to which she devotes much time and energy, is the organization, coordination, and facilitation of a special sort of mifgashim – meetings between Polish Jews and non-Jews with their Jewish peers (e.g., pupils, students, adults, Ministry of Education, IDF, etc.) on pilgrimages in Poland from Israel and all over the world.

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