Robert Shapiro, whose teachers and masters were prominent experts in the field of history - Isaiah Trunk and Lucjan Dobroszycki - has unique knowledge of the history of Łódź. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the city of Łódź in the interwar period. He translated the first large monograph of the Łódź ghetto, entitled "Łódź Ghetto. A history", which was published by Trunk in 1962 in Yiddish (its English translation was issued in 2002). As he is fluent in Yiddish, Polish, German and Hebrew, he has access to a great amount of literature on the Ghetto in Litzmannstadt. He translated or participated in translations of several important journals and documents related to the Ghetto, i.a. texts which can be found in the Ringelblum Archive. During his conversation with Joanna Podolska, he will discuss the most important sources used in the study of the history of the Łódź Ghetto, such as little known documents found in the ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Robert Moses Shapiro - a professor at the Department of Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College, researcher of the history of the Jewish self-government in Łódź and the Łódź Ghetto, author of several books and several dozens of scientific papers. He is currently working on the English issue of the journal of Jakub Poznański from the Łódź Ghetto.