Away with the Jews!! or What the Zakopane Microhistory Reveals

On March 24, 2026, the research seminar Away with the Jews!! or What the Zakopane Microhistory Reveals will be held by Dr. Karolina Panz.

Zakopane is a unique place on the map of Poland: a village in the Podhale region cut off from the world, surrounded by the “fairytale world of the Tatras,” which has become “the pearl of Poland and its lungs,” described in endless pieces of literature. However, what first drew my attention was the story of Jewish children who survived the Holocaust and were attacked and persecuted in Zakopane shortly after the war.
In order to understand why a Jewish orphanage operating in this idyllic though idealized small town would need guards and rifles on its verandas, I uncovered successive layers and elements of a history that turned out to be a project of “de-Judaizing” Zakopane, promoted and carried out from the moment the town was “discovered.” This project involved members of nationwide cultural and political elites, local authorities, local activists, and the highlanders. In my presentation, I will discuss the slogans proclaimed, shouted, written, and debated in Zakopane’s salons in the 1930s and 1940s. I will talk about their authors, propagators, and the actions they undertook in the name of fighting the town’s alleged “Judaization,” or in pursuit of the personal benefits that “de-Judaizing” Zakopane offered during the Holocaust and immediately afterward.

Karolina Panz – PhD, sociologist, member of the Center for Research on the Holocaust of Jews, assistant professor at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She lives in Podhale and for over a dozen years has been researching the fate of local Jews during the Holocaust and in the postwar period, as well as taking part in efforts to restore their memory. She has been repeatedly awarded for her social activism and her courage in addressing difficult historical topics. In 2020, her dissertation on the Jews of Nowy Targ received the First Prize in the Majer Bałaban Competition for the best doctoral dissertation on Jews and Israel, as well as the First Prize in the Inka Brodzka-Wald Competition for the best doctoral dissertation in the humanities. She is a recipient of the Claims Conference Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Shoah Studies (2024/2025). She currently heads the NCN project “Faces of Smuggling on the Polish-Slovak Borderland, 1918–1949.” Her latest book has just been published, titled I Would Like to Tell How the Town Was Killed... The Destruction of the Jewish Inhabitants of Nowy Targ.

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Photo: Cemetery in Zakopane, 1966. Yad Vashem Archives