Open Academic seminar of the Centre. Monika Stolarczyk‑Bilardie will deliver a lecture entitled Mobile Witnesses and Transnational Networks: Foreign Intermediaries and the Polish Church Hierarchy in the Face of the Holocaust (1941–1943).

11.06.2026 12:05:44

Open Academic Seminar

Monika Sotlarczyk-Bilardie

Mobile Witnesses and Transnational Networks: Foreign Intermediaries and the Polish Church Hierarchy in the Face of the Holocaust (1941–1943).

The meeting will take place on

Wednesday, June 24th, in Room 161 at Staszic Palace (72 Nowy Świat Street) at 11:00 a.m.

IMPORTANT NOTICE! The seminar will take place exclusively in person. No online participation will be available.

The aim of the presentation is to analyse the informational relations and mechanisms of transmitting knowledge about the Holocaust between the structures of the Polish Church, the Vatican, and a network of foreign intermediaries in the years 1941–1943. Drawing on the holdings of the Vatican archives, I will examine the role of the so‑called “mobile witnesses” (Italian managers and chaplains) and juxtapose Archbishop Adam Sapieha’s cautious stance with the distinctive activism of Bishop Stanisław Adamski, who funnelled reports on the extermination of Jews to Rome. The presentation will also attempt to address the question of how this critical, external perspective of foreign observers influenced the early, crisis‑driven formation of narratives of “Polish innocence” and the selective remembrance of the Holocaust.

Dr Monika Stolarczyk‑Bilardie is a historian and philologist (a graduate in German and Dutch Studies at the University of Warsaw). She completed an MA in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam in cooperation with NIOD (UvA/NIOD) and earned a PhD in history at KU Leuven, where she held an FWO Flanders doctoral fellowship. She currently works as a postdoctoral research fellow at KU Leuven within the research group History of Modernity and Society (MoSa). Her research focuses on the Holocaust, with particular attention to the attitudes of so‑called bystanders and the Catholic Church. She is the author of articles published in leading academic journals, including Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały and Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah, as well as a chapter in the monograph Pius XII and the Low Countries (1939–1958) (Brepols, 2025). She is currently pursuing two research projects: one examining the role of Italian couriers during the war, and another—conducted within the LIAS (Leuven Institute for Advanced Studies) programme Why Genocide?—on perceptions of genocide. In parallel, she is working on her first monograph based on her doctoral research.