In memory
of the late Eulalia Łazarska
(1948-2026)

Eulalia—widely known as Lilka or Lila—was born in the Masovian village of Gralewo, as the daughter of Jadwiga and Władysław Łazarski. Throughout her life, she cultivated her parents' combatant tradition and was a member of the World Association of Home Army Soldiers. She graduated from Henryk Sienkiewicz I General Secondary School in Płońsk in 1965. With a great talent for foreign languages (she was fluent in German, English, and Russian), she first studied at the State Stenography and Foreign Languages College in Warsaw, then at the Main School of Planning and Statistics (now the Warsaw School of Economics), where she earned a master's degree in the prestigious field of Foreign Trade Economics. At the same time, starting from 1967, she worked in increasingly senior positions at companies trading with the Federal Republic of Germany. From 1985, for the company "Instalchem" in Wiesbaden as a valued export specialist, and after Poland regained independence, in 1991 she joined the group of co-founders of the "Domilicium" company which conducted construction and structural work in the FRG and employed Polish engineers and workers. She returned to Poland permanently in 1995 and successfully co-managed the company until 2003.

As noted by the brother of the late Eulalia Łazarska, Prof. Krzysztof Łazarski, "what ultimately became the project of her life, to which she devoted herself with extraordinary passion, only happened when she was planning to spend a serene retirement." In 2004, she became the managing director of the Institute for Civic Space and Social Policy at Lazarski University which she co-founded with the outstanding historian of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Andrzej Sulima Kamiński, a professor at Georgetown University. The Institute established a research team dealing with history, philosophy, economics, anthropology, and international relations. It organized seminars and lectures for Lazarski University students, led by visiting professors from Georgetown and other world-class universities. As part of its activities, the Institute launched the East European Program, including the Belarusian Center run by Belarusian democratic activists, and also organized five conferences accompanied by post-conference publications. In 2019, Eulalia Łazarska became the director of the "Postdoctoral Fellowships" program. It provided American historians whose doctoral theses concerned Polish history with a two-year stay in our country. With free access to archives and libraries, in collaboration with Polish scholars, they could refine their works, turning them into monographs worthy of publication by the best university presses in the USA. This, in turn, gave them a chance of employment at top Anglo-Saxon universities.

The Institute's and its associated Foundation's most enduring achievement is the recurring "Recovering Forgotten History" conference. It arose from the inspiration of Prof. Kamiński and his Georgetown colleague, Prof. James Collins, as a response to the ignorance, harmful stereotypes, and persistently repeated errors about Polish history in American university textbooks, particularly those for the subject known as "Western Civilization." Łazarska developed and implemented a unique program under which, initially twice a year and later once a year, a dozen or so authors and publishers were invited for a multi-day stay in Poland. During it, guests were not only shown the treasures of Polish culture and treated to exquisite cuisine. It was primarily a time of intensive and fruitful work. At the seminars held then, manuscripts of books were reviewed and discussed in depth with the participation of Polish historians. Among the first participants was Prof. John Merriman from Yale University, author of the repeatedly reissued—and, thanks to "Recovering Forgotten History," corrected—A History of Modern Europe since the Renaissance.

Over time, the program's scope expanded to include monographs, collective volumes, source publications, and historical atlases devoted to the history of Poland and Central and Eastern Europe. The group of reviewers grew to include historians from Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, as well as researchers studying the history of Poland and the old Commonwealth at renowned universities in North America and Western Europe. Among the academic publishers regularly participating in the program are, among others: Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Princeton University Press, Harvard University Press, Yale University Press, University of Toronto Press, McGill-Queen’s University Press, and University of Pittsburgh Press.

The Foundation for Civic Space and Social Policy independently implemented "Recovering Forgotten History" from 2014. In 2022, the Polish History Museum joined as a partner and took over the organization of the conferences, ensuring the program's further development under the scientific direction of the Museum's Chief Historian. Eulalia Łazarska participated in the first three conferences held under the Museum's auspices—in Wrocław, Kraków, and Warsaw—but her health prevented her from attending in Poznań in 2025. During many joint meetings, with her characteristic charm, she spoke with authors, publishers, reviewers, and organizers, bearing witness to her love for Poland and kindness toward people until the end. We will all miss her greatly.

Honor to her memory!

 
Written by Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski, Chief Historian of the Museum of the History of Poland, April 7, 2026