Krystyna Kersten

Krystyna Kersten (pen name, Jan Bujnowski; born Krystyna Goławska May 25, 1931 in Poznań – July 10, 2008 in Warsaw) was a Polish historian, a professor at the Historical Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of Collegium Invisibile. Described as "the first lady of Polish historiography", her essays on topics including Communism, Jews in Poland, and post-war Poland, have been collected in a number of volumes. Kersten was born in 1931 to a family of Polish intelligentsia. Her father, Edmund Goławski, was the regional public prosecutor at the district court in Gniezno. He was taken prisoner by the Soviets in 1939 and murdered in Katyn in the spring of 1944, sparking his daughter's resistance to cooperation with the ruling authorities. She graduated from the faculty of history of the University of Warsaw and taught there for several decades. Although her master's thesis, entitled Rynek lokalny Wielunia w XVI w. (transl. The Local Market of Wieluń in the 16th Century), focused on medieval Polish, she was hired by Tadeusz Manteuffel in 1954 to teach the history of contemporary Poland. Kersten was a member of the Union of Polish Youth between 1948 and 1956. She joined the Communist Party (PZPR) in 1956 with hopes of pluralism and greater political openness in the post-Stalin era. Protesting the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, she left the party in 1968 and became active in the democratic opposition movement in the 1970s and 1980s, including the Solidarity Movement. In 1975, Kersten was one of 7 intellectuals who signed an open letter to Edward Gierek, secretary of the PZPR, faulting him for breaking promises made after the workers' strikes in December 1970. Prior to her break with the party, Kersten's work hewed much more closely to the official Party narrative, i.e. in her...