Bundesarchiv | Arolsen Archives

Bożena Iwanowska

Bożena Iwanowska, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the University of Economics and Human Sciences (Warsaw, Poland) and Director of the UEHS Academic Center for Holocaust and Genocide Research. She received her three Master’s degrees in English Philology and Interpreting, Cultural Studies and Political Studies at the University of Białystok (Poland) and Lancaster University (UK). In 2013 she earned her PhD focused on the legitimacy of power & political discourse analysis from the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences under the supervision of the leading Polish sociologist Professor Andrzej Rychard, and scholarly reviews of other leading Polish sociologists and political scientists, Professor Henryk Domański and Professor Andrzej Skrzypek. Dr. Iwanowska is also a Holocaust Educator: she completed more than 50 courses organized by the Tel Aviv University, Yad Vashem The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, University College London, The Open University, University of Nottingham, University of Birmingham, ADL and USC Shoah Foundations, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, JCCs in Kraków and Warsaw. She is one of the authors of a specialized course entitled “Introduction to the Holocaust, Major Genocides of the 20th and 21st Centuries, Violence, Human Rights and Remembrance Course” which is taught to the UEHS students coming from more than 60 countries around the world. Dr. Iwanowska is a member of the British Alumni Society (since 2009), Polish Association for Jewish Studies (since 2012).

Dr. Iwanowska is the recipient of George Soros Open Society Foundations Fellowship (2008-2012) and several EHRI Fellowships.  

Dr. Iwanowska’s grandparents originate from the pre-war Polish eastern border territories and it is for this reason that her scientific research is focused on these provinces. She has a scholarly interest in Jewish education in the interwar period (1919 – 1939), and Holocaust on the German-occupied eastern territories of Poland. Her articles have appeared in the Jewish History Quarterly in 2012 - 2022 (“The Extermination of Jews from Baranowicze Ghetto as Reported by Witness and Inmate Grzegorz Bresław”; “The extermination of Jews in Zaostrowiecze (Nowogródek voivodship, Nieśwież poviat) during WWII”, “The extermination of the Jews in Siniawka and Naruszewicze (Nowogródek voivodship, Nieśwież poviat) in the years 1941-1942”; “Jewish Education in Kletsk under the Russian partition until 1914”; “Jewish schools against the background of general education in the Kletsk Region of Nieśwież poviat and Nowogródek voivodeship in Poland in 1921 – 1939”).

She is currently completing a manuscript on memoires of people who escaped from the Baranovichi ghetto and joined the Jewish partisan movement in 1943. Her most recent project focuses on reconstruction of the activities of the 707th Wehrmacht Infantry Division on the territory of contemporary Belarus (pre-1939 Polish territory), and participation of this division in the crime of genocide of the Jewish inhabitants of Kletsk and the surrounding villages between 1941-1943.