The Holocaust in Polish Literature

Agnieszka Grudzinska’s book focuses on how Polish writers approached the Holocaust, or, to put it another way, what the Holocaust did to Polish literature, during and after the event. In doing so, the author gives us a whole section of Holocaust literature that is little known in France to read. While some of the writers in the book have been translated over time, most have not, and by analyzing their works, Agnieszka Grudzinska carries out an important work of cultural transfer for the French public.

It is not only a question of adding a national literature to the knowledge that we can have of the “witness texts” (p. 22) of the Shoah, but, by the very fact of the special status that Poland and its literature maintain with the genocide, of giving us a new perspective on it, even of upsetting the one we had of it.

Prose and Poetry of the Shoah

The expression “witness text” takes on a particular connotation here. Poland, as we know, was the country where the most Jews died, and where the Nazi policy of destruction largely took place. These two elements form the basis of the two entities of the title: Jewish victims, Polish witnesses. The “witness texts” are therefore those that bear the trace of this state of affairs. But Poland is also a country that has an extremely strong literary tradition and is closely linked to the feeling of national identity, this fact constituting the third dimension, not made explicit from the outset, but central to the development of this fascinating essay.

The author uses a very pedagogical approach, starting with two long introductory parts on the history of the Jews in Poland, then on the major theories that accompanied the emergence of the testimony of the Shoah, to bring the reader to his own terrain, that of Polish literature of the Shoah. From there, the essay is divided into two sections, “prose” and “poetry”, themselves subdivided into subgenres, including readings of works by several Polish-language writers between 1940 and 1960.

Through her analyses, Agnieszka Grudzinska highlights the way in which the works of some Polish witnesses were affected by this event, becoming testimonies without the writer always being aware of it at the time of writing. As Andrzejewski, one of the writer-witnesses, says about a short story written in 1943, “this short story responded to the needs of my mind and my heart, and I did not think that over the years some of its pages would become a historical testimony” (p. 310). The case of Medallions by Sofia Nalkowska, written between 1945 and 1946, in this “just after” which shows the continuity of the literature of testimony beyond the usual chronological breaks, and whose French translation, carried out by the author, was only published recently, constitutes on the contrary one of the exemplary cases of a writer-witness having very early become aware of what was happening.

Identity schism

But it is above all by showing how several of the writers have taken up key genres of Polish literature in order to subvert their meaning that the work reveals its true project. Right from the introduction, the author alludes to the “ties that (the) poetry of the Shoah has kept with romanticism”. This “romantic matrix” of Polish literature is linked to its history and its status as a young nation, in the construction of which the great writers – first and foremost the poets – have played an essential role.

This is also where another dimension comes into play: if, at first glance, the opposition between victims and witnesses seems to overlap with the opposition between Jews and Poles, things quickly appear more complex. In the same way that literature also bears witness to the experience lived by Polish victims of the Nazis (analyzed in particular through the case of Borowski), the Polish Jewish writers present in the work generally felt more Polish than Jewish.

It is the prism of language that determines this identity schism: Polish speakers because assimilated, the Polish Jews who testified in Polish are not sociologically the same as those who testified in Yiddish. Among the examples analyzed in the book, that of Julian Tuwim, one of the greatest Polish writers of the 20th^e century, explaining how he began to feel Jewish after the Shoah, because some of his relatives had been victims, appears exemplary of these trajectories.

In the Skamander movement, founded by Tuwim before the war, there was also a woman, Zuzanna Ginczanka. Responding to the triple particularity of being “woman, poet, Jew” (p. 137), she had already acquired a certain notoriety. In a poem she wrote during the war, just before being denounced and killed, she takes up the plot of another famous poem of Polish literature, “My Testament”, written by a poet of the 19th^e century, Juliusz Slowacki. A. Grudzinska shows how, by rewriting this poem-testament, the poetess “self-disinherits Polish poetry”:

She rejects the European and Polish civilizationist heritage that has not kept its humanist promises, abandoning her illusions and bequeathing her “Jewish things” to those who will seize them after her death. (p. 145-146)

The poet and the Nobel Prize

In the chapter dedicated to Milosz, probably the most famous among the authors analyzed for his poem “Campo dei fiori” written in 1943, at the heart of the article by Jan Blonski that launched the debate on Polish responsibility in the 1980s, the author concludes:

Among the authors presented in this book, Ginczanka is the only true victim of the Shoah and Milosz is the only true witness (…) Jewish victim, Polish witness. (p. 164)

This comparison, even if it does not do justice to the complexity of the cases contained in the work, captures their quintessence. It is interesting because it brings together, in a symmetrical image, two figures that seem to be opposed in every way, an unknown poetess with a tragic destiny and an exiled poet, Nobel Prize winner, famous on the international scene.

This rapprochement also highlights the role played by poetry in Polish literature of the Holocaust: a central role, as in Polish literature in general, illustrated in the book through the works as fascinating as they are diverse by Rosewicz, Broniewski and others.

The French reader who is new to the subject discovers in the same movement, through the analyses, two moments of Polish literature: the canons of this literature and the texts of witnesses who drew on this tradition to reveal its nonsense after the Shoah. Through this double gesture, we are given the opportunity to grasp, through the prism of the Polish case and through the variations that compose the works presented, a truth of current literature: how it has been radically called into question by the writing of testimony.