Biography
Jan T. Gross was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1947 to Hanna Szumańska, a Polish mother, who was a member of the Polish resistance (Armia Krajowa) and Zygmunt Gross, a Polish-Jewish father who was a PPS member. His mother, risking her own life, helped his father to survive the German Nazi occupation of Poland. They married after the war. Jan Tomasz Gross studied physics at the Warsaw University.
He was among the young dissidents called Komandosi, and consequently among the university students involved in the protest movement known as the "March Events," the Polish student and intellectual protests of 1968. Gross was expelled from the university, arrested and jailed for five months. As a consequence, and because the Polish government permitted the emigration of "people of Jewish origin" at that time, he emigrated with his parents to the United States in 1969. In 1975 he earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Yale University, and has taught at Yale, NYU, and Paris. He acquired U.S. citizenship and currently teaches history at Princeton University.
Gross was awarded the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland in 1996, an award granted to foreigners for their exceptional role in cooperation between Poland and other nations. He was also a Senior Fulbright Research, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial, and Rockefeller Humanities Fellow.
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