When six years of ferocious resistance to Nazi occupation came to an end in 1945, a devastated Poland could agree with its new Soviet rulers on little else beyond the need to punish German war criminals and their collaborators. Determined to root out the “many Cains among us,” as a newspaper editorial put it, Poland’s judicial reckoning spawned 32,000 trials and spanned more than a decade before being largely forgotten.

Long dismissed as a communist travesty, these “August Trials” were in fact a scrupulous search for the truth. But as the process of retribution began to unearth evidence of enthusiastic local participation in the Holocaust, the hated government, traumatized populace, and fiercely independent judiciary all struggled to salvage a purely heroic vision of the past that could unify a nation recovering from massive upheaval. Based on this example, Andrew Kornbluth will discuss some of the many ways in which the Holocaust complicated resistance and collaboration during the Second World War, as well as our postwar understanding of the same.

Andrew Kornbluth holds a PhD in Eastern European history from the University of California, Berkeley. The book based on his dissertation research, The August Trials: The Holocaust and Postwar Justice in Poland , won the 2020 Ernst Fraenkel Prize from the Wiener Holocaust Library, the 2022 Salo Wittmayer Baron Book Prize from the American Academy for Jewish Research, and the 2022 Reginald Zelnik Book Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies.