Katarzyna Person is a historian of the Holocaust and Deputy Director of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum. She has published extensively on the history of Jews in Poland during the Holocaust and in the immediate post-war period.

Person’s work revolves around individual and communal responsibility, choice, and justice during and after the Holocaust. She seeks out the silenced voices of victims who are generally marginalized for failing to live up to the standard that defines who is “fit” to transmit the memory of the Holocaust. Her work attempts to answer the questions of how atrocity is remembered, who and why society chooses to silence and how these things evolve over time.

By using often-overlooked sources, she is able to bring into scholarship some very difficult stories of death and survival, including those of women, children, people deemed to be “collaborators”, deportees and refugees, presenting a broader, fuller story of the Holocaust and its aftermath than what was previously known.     

Person 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), among others.  She is the author and co-author of five volumes of documents from the Ringelblum Archive and she heads the Full Edition of the Ringelblum Archive publication project at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.

Person earned a PhD in History from the University of London and has held postdoctoral fellowships at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, Gerda Henkel Fellow). She has worked at the Wiesenthal Institut für Holocaust-Studien in Vienna, at the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah in Paris, at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich, at the Center for Jewish History in New York City and at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.