Professor Piotr Wrobel about phrase in “Uprising” promotion.

I am looking forward to watching the mini-series entitled “Uprising.” I have been specializing in the Polish-Jewish history for many years and I teach it at the University of Toronto. My seminar on the “Polish Jews since the Partitions of Poland” is a part of the University’s Jewish Studies Program and I hope that I will be able to discuss the series with my students. Yet, I am surprised and disappointed with a write-up of the film presented on the NBC website. It includes a sentence “Against impossible odds, they [the insurgents] hold off the German army longer than the entire country of Poland…” The Warsaw Ghetto uprising was a tragic and heroic event but, unfortunately, from a military point of view, it was almost completely irrelevant. Comparing it to Poland’s contribution to World War II compromises the series before it has been broadcast.

Piotr Wrobel Ph. D.

Associate Professor and Konstanty Reynert Chair of Polish History

University of Toronto

Bio for Professor Wróbel

• Konstanty Reynert Chair of Polish Studies at the University of Toronto.
• Taught at the University of Warsaw, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Michigan State University at East Lansing and at the University of California at Davis.
• Has been a visiting scholar at the Institute of European History in Mainz, at Humboldt University in Berlin, at the Institute of Polish-Jewish Studies at Oxford, and at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
• Research fellow at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw 1987-1991
• Research director 1987-1988 of a clandestine Eastern Archive, which collected materials on the Polish people deported to the Soviet Union after 1939.
• Authored or co-authored about 50 scholarly articles and nine books, including The Historical Dictionary of Poland, 1945-1996 published by the Greenwood Press in 1998. Serves on the Advisory Board of Polin: A Journal of Polish-Jewish Studies, on the Board of Directors of the Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation of Canada and on the Governing Council of the American Association for Polish-Jewish Studies.