The Warsaw Ghetto Museum is a historical museum in Warsaw currently under construction in the historic complex of the former Bersohn and Bauman Children’s Hospital. Set up in one of the most important surviving buildings of the Warsaw Ghetto, it will focus on the story of Europe’s largest ghetto and its inhabitants’ life and death. In order to tell their complete story, it will reach out to voices which we rarely hear: those of children, women, refugees and deportees, and other groups who were marginalised in the overall history of the ghetto. My lecture will discuss how we plan to achieve this and how the new Museum will fit in the memory landscape of today’s Warsaw.
Dr hab. Katarzyna Person is a historian of the Holocaust and Director of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum. She holds a PhD from the University of London and has received among others fellowships and grants from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Center for Jewish History in NYC, Yad Vashem, Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris, Wiener Wiesenthal Institut für Holocaust-Studien in Vienna. She also held the The Workers Circle/Dr. Emanuel Patt Visiting Professorship in YIVO Institute For Jewish Research in NYC. Katarzyna Person is the author of Assimilated Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto 1940-1943 (Syracuse University Press, 2014), Warsaw Ghetto Police: The Jewish Order Service during the Nazi Occupation (Cornell University Press in association with United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2021), Przemysłowa Concentration Camp. The Camp. The Children. The Trials (with Johannes-Dieter Steinert; Palgrave Macmillan 2023), and Polnische Juden in der amerikanischen und der britischen Besatzungszone Deutschlands, 1945–1948 (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2023). Her most recent book is The Hour of Revenge: Holocaust Survivors and Their Search for Revenge and Retribution (Toronto University Press, 2025) She headed the Full Edition of the Ringelblum Archive publication project at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw for which she was awarded the 2024 Dan David Prize.
