Tomasz Szarota

Tomasz Marceli Szarota was born in Warsaw on 2 January 1940. His father, Rafał Marceli Blüth, a literary historian, Catholic writer and one of the first Polish Sovietologists, had been shot by the Germans in a mass execution in November 1939, a few weeks before his son was born. His mother, Elida Maria Szarota, was a scholar of Romance and German philology.

He graduated in 1957 from the XIV Secondary School in Warsaw, today the Stanisław Staszic school, and studied history at the University of Warsaw from 1957 to 1962. His master's thesis on the Whites' Directorate in the January Uprising, written under Stefan Kieniewicz, received the Emil Kipa prize for the best master's thesis of the year.

In 1962 Szarota joined the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where he worked for the rest of his life. He gained his doctorate there in 1966, supervised by Franciszek Ryszka, with a thesis on postwar Polish urban settlement in Lower Silesia, and his habilitation in 1978 on the basis of the second, expanded edition of Okupowanej Warszawy dzień powszedni, his study of daily life in occupied Warsaw. He became an associate professor in 1985 and a full professor in 1991, and headed the institute's department for the history of Poland after 1945 until 2010. He held fellowships in Germany, including from the Humboldt Foundation, as well as in France and Belgium, and was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna in 1998.

His research centred on the twentieth century: the German occupation of Poland, resistance during the Second World War, everyday life in Warsaw and other capitals occupied by the Third Reich, national stereotypes, and caricature as a historical source. With Krystyna Kersten he edited a large collection of memoirs about the Polish countryside from 1939 to 1948, and he edited many diaries and memoirs of the twentieth century.

His books included Stefan Rowecki Grot (1983), Niemiecki Michel (1988), V jak zwycięstwo (1994), a study of daily life in the occupied capitals of Europe (1995), U progu Zagłady (2000), published in English in 2015 as On the Threshold of the Holocaust, Tajemnica śmierci Stefana Starzyńskiego (2020), Zapomniana egzekucja. Natolin, listopad 1939 (2021), and a 2022 book on Elżbieta Zahorska. Many of his works appeared in German translation.

He sat on the academic council of the Polish Academy of Sciences' Centre for Historical Research in Berlin from 2006 to 2018, on the programme board of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk from 2009 to 2017, and on the Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites from 2013 to 2020. He chaired the jury of the Klio prize of historical book publishers from 1996 to 2023 and of the Tomasz Strzembosz prize from 2010 to 2024, edited the series Polska 1944/45 to 1989 from 2003 to 2023, and from 2024 sat on the council of the Museum of Polish History. He also wrote for Polityka, Tygodnik Powszechny, Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita and was a historical consultant on several Polish films.

From 1962 Szarota was married to the historian Anna Szarota, daughter of the medievalist Tadeusz Manteuffel, after whom the Institute of History is named. Their son, Piotr Szarota, born in 1966, became a psychologist and cultural scholar and a professor at the Institute of Psychology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Szarota lived in Warsaw. In 2025 he published a memoir in interview form, Duma i wstyd. O historii i potrzebie pamiętania.

Tomasz Szarota died on 10 August 2026, aged 86. His death was announced by the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences and by the Polish Biographical Dictionary, on whose academic council he sat, and the Museum of Polish History, Gazeta Wyborcza and others published tributes. No cause of death was made public.

His funeral took place on 31 August 2026 at the Halpert Chapel of the Evangelical Augsburg Cemetery on Młynarska Street in Warsaw, where he was buried.

Szarota's study of daily life in occupied Warsaw became a standard work, read well beyond academic circles, and his comparative work on the occupied capitals and on anti Jewish violence in occupied Europe carried his research to German and English speaking readers. The Institute of History remembered him as a scholar who always stood on the side of historical truth and taught his students to be critical. In 2010 colleagues marked his seventieth birthday with the book Niepiękny wiek XX, and in 2017 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Opole.