Anna Bikont

Anna Bikont (born 17 July 1954) is a Polish journalist for the "Gazeta Wyborcza" newspaper in Warsaw. She is the author of several books, including "My z Jedwabnego" (2004) about the 1941 Jedwabne pogrom, which was published in English as "" (2015). The French edition, "Le crime et le silence", won the European Book Prize in 2011.
Early life and education.
Bikont was born in a Polish-Jewish family in Warsaw to journalist and Catholic-Polish writer Andrzej Kruczkowski. She has a sister, Maria Kruczkowska. Bikont was awarded an MA in psychology from Warsaw University.
Career.
Bikont worked for Warsaw University until 1988. Between 1982 and 1989 she was an underground Solidarity activist. She was co-founder and editor of "Tygodnik Mazowsze" weekly, Poland's largest underground publication. In 1989 she became one of the founders of "Gazeta Wyborcza", the first legal newspaper published outside the communist government's control. It became independent of Solidarity in 1990. She has continued to work for the paper as a senior journalist.
In response to Jan T. Gross's history of the Jedwabne massacre, ' (2001), the Polish government commissioned an investigation led by prosecutor Radosław Ignatiew for the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN). Bikont began her own journalistic investigation, interviewing numerous people in Jedwabne, including descendants of survivors and persons living in the city when Gross's book was published. She expanded her work into the non-fiction book "My z Jedwabnego" (2004, "Jedwabne: Battlefield of Memory"). It was published in French under the title "Le crime et le silence" (2011) and won the European Book Prize. The book was published in English in 2015 as '.
Writer Julian Barnes, one of the judges of the 2011 European Book Prize, describes her history as "more than a book of memory. It is also a book about forgetting, about the pollution of memory, about the conflict between the easy, convenient truth and the awkward, harder truth. It is a work that grows from its journalistic manner and origins into the powerful writing of necessary history."
Her husband, journalist and director Piotr Bikont (1955–2017), died in a car accident in 2017.