Small ghettos – defined, following the interwar Polish state classification of “small Jewish religious communities,” as those located in towns and villages with Jewish communities of under 5000—formed the majority of ghettos in occupied Poland during World War II. Despite recent progress in research on previously marginalized experiences of the Holocaust, the collective story of these small communities remains under or unrepresented.

Dr. Katarzyna Person will examine the small ghettos and the everyday living and dying of their inhabitants, reclaiming their voices for comprehensive history of the Holocaust. She will focus on the early stages of functioning of local formal and informal Jewish wartime leadership, in particular Judenräte and Jewish Self-Help branches in these small communities. Their responsibilities included registering the population, providing social care for both local Jews and refugees, organizing food distribution, medical care, and education, and meeting religious needs.

The lecture aims to address two significant gaps in Holocaust scholarship: persecution of Jews in the early stages of the occupation of rural Poland and the functioning of the Jewish leadership (formal and informal) outside major, well-researched ghettos. It will also enable a discussion of the complex calculation of the benefits and losses that individuals believed they could make at the earliest stages of the Holocaust.

Dr .Katarzyna Person is a historian of the Holocaust and Director of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum. She holds a PhD from the University of London.

She 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.

She was the recipient of the 2024 Fred and Ellen Lewis/JDC Archives Fellowship. In addition, she has also received 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 Workers Circle/Dr. Emanuel Patt Visiting Professorship at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in NYC.