2022 Recipient

The Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History, established in 2009 and sponsored by the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia in the field of history in the previous calendar year.

Co-Winner: Andrew Kornbluth
Title: The August Trials: The Holocaust and Postwar Justice in Poland (Harvard University Press)

Based upon a scrupulous reading of newly available documents from postwar trials of Nazi war criminals and their collaborators, Andrew Kornbluth’s The Holocaust and Postwar Justice in Poland is a revelatory tour de force. In frequently painful detail, it reveals Polish collaboration with the Nazi butchery of Jews to have been both more violent and more widespread than previously thought, while at the same time tracing the development of the myth of heroic Polish resistance to the Nazi occupation as it took shape in the post-war period—a myth that differed little, the author shows, from post-war myths that circulate elsewhere in formerly Nazi-occupied Europe. Kornbluth has produced a beautifully written book.

Co-Winner: Vladislav Zubok