In the Shadows of Destruction
Jacek Leociak
0000-00-00The Holocaust took place in Poland, and in the presence of the Poles. It left a special stamp on the place and gave rise to an exceptional obligation. In many senses, including the sense that it became an object of ideological manipulation before it could be taken in and understood in a sufficiently profound and unhindered way, the Holocaust casts a shadow on Polish literature, on Polish history, and on the Polish awareness.
The texts rescued from the Holocaust do more than speak about the horror of that world. They are a part of that world. Here, eyewitness veracity and the truth of the legacy have become indivisible. To authors who run the risks of writing about the Holocaust, this is a fundamental challenge. Never before has the gulf between the scale of the experience and the means for expressing it been so deep. Never, too, has literature, as a realm of fiction, convention, and tricks, ever seemed so inappropriate as in contact with the experience of the Holocaust. Some of the texts that arose out of the lowest reaches of personal experience could serve as evidence of trust in traditional literary form, such as the stories of Adolf Rudnicki or Bohdan Wojdowski's Chleb rzucony umarlym. Others take the shape of personal documents written after the passage of many years. These include I wiecej nic nie pamietam, the terrifyingly austere memoirs of the ghetto doctor, Adina Blady-Szwagier, or the reconstruction of vestigial memories of a ghetto childhood as performed half a century on, in Michal Glowinski's Czarne sezony.
In the prose of the Eighties and Nineties, we can note a movement away from literature as traditionally conceived towards 'more capacious forms,' as exemplified on the one hand by the writing of Hanna Krall, and on the other by that of Henryk Grynberg. Both of them reject the temptation to take a 'belletristic' approach to the Holocaust, while nevertheless bearing in mind that telling about the Holocaust is an art form, and thereby requires a choice of narrative strategies and principles to organize the realms of facts, memory, and imagination. Since the time of her famous book Shielding the Flame, Hanna Krall has been publishing documentary stories in such collections as Hipnoza, Taniec na cudzym weselu, Dowody na istnienie, and Tam juz nie ma zadnej rzeki. She has worked out a unique style and a characteristic rhythm of phrases and compositional forms. She allows her witnesses to speak, while also highlighting her own subjectivity and the contemporary perspective. She herself is present in all the stories that other people tell, delving into the course of events, asking about details that prompt the imagination and help the reader to feel and understand. She brings voices from the past and present into collision, and lays bare various levels of memory and various versions of events, but she always does so in the name of reconstructing an individual fate and learning about a specific person who was caught up in the mechanism of the Holocaust. She aims not only to establish an objective truth, but above all to attest to the truth of what she says through someone's personal experience. This is how she makes herself credible as a narrator of the Holocaust.
Henryk Grynberg has said that his writing is simply a 'withdrawal from literature.' The evolution of Grynberg's epic form begoins with the relation of his own experience and broadens out into a story of the many individual fates that make up the collective fate. In Zydowska wojna and Zwyciestwo, we are dealing with a child's narrative. In Dziedzictwo, the classical narrative frame is replaced by a transcript of the soundtrack of a documentary film in which Grynberg returns to his hometown to search for the grave of his father, who was murdered by peasants. In Dzieci Syjonu and Kronika, the presence of the authorial 'I' is replaced by a montage of archival documents: testimony by Jewish children taken out of Russia by General Anders's Army, and chronicles of the Lodz ghetto. In the collection Drohobycz, Drohobycz, Grynberg draws on documents and interviews to compose eleven stories about the Holocaust and the irremovable scars that it left behind. By withdrawing from literature, Grynberg thus reaches its very core: the epic, in which the individual narrator dissolves into a narrative community of storytellers.
In his autobiographical novel Kon Pana Boga, Wilhelm Dichter portrays the world of the Holocaust and the world after the Holocaust as seen through the eyes of a child. The narrator's childlike vision is pure and naive in its confrontation with the danger of the described reality, without the slightest trace of authorial commentary, unmediated by anything that would destroy the illusion of having to do with an authentic child's account. This sort of novelistic construction allows the reader to forget about the literary game and stand face to face with the incarnate truth of personal witness.
In his novel Tworki, Marek Bienczyk does not evade either the signs of the literary or the display of the distance between the narrator and the protagonist. Nor does he evade the problems inherent in the very process of telling a story. He makes an effort to bridge the gulf that divides him from that world. He seeks a language in which his characters can communicate, and he seeks out the traces left behind in that language by their personalities, their experiences, and the mysterious fate that was dramatically twisted by the Holocaust. In this novel, the Holocaust itself is absent, but it casts a deep shadow on both the presented world and the effort to convey that world.
The literary witness to the Holocaust also embraces what might be called the landscape after the Destruction. That theme recently appeared with particular force in Irit Amiel's Osmaleni. Amiel lives in Israel and writes in Polish. She traces with precision and restraint the vestiges and scars bequeathed by the Holocaust to those who were sentenced to survive. The meaning of the Holocaust also weighs upon the children of the survivors, whose true identity is concealed from them. In Krajobraz z dzieckiem, Roman Gren shows how a couple belonging to the communist power apparatus go to absurd lengths of obfuscation in order to save their ten-year-old son from being stigmatized as a Jew in a country without Jews. In Mykwa, Zyta Rudzka shows how the next generation is entangled in the conundrums of human fate woven by the Holocaust, as well as in a heritage of remembered pain, humility, and fear, as the past intruides upon the present and changes the lives of the characters.
Jacek Leociak
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