English
Polish
Stanislaw Sreniowski, From a Book of Madness And Atrocity
Jacek Leociak
jleociak@gmail.com Biolecturer in the Institute of Literary Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, head of the Holocaust Literature Studies Department of the Institute, member of the Polish Centre for Holocaust Research of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Co-author with Barbara Engelking The Warsaw Getto. A Guide to the Perished City (2009, Polish edition 2001)
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1471-6926
Institite of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences
Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, No. 1 (2005), pages: 246-250
Publication date: 2005-12-01
Abstract
The title of this text, From the Book of Madness and Atrocity, published here for the first time, indicates its generic and stylistic specificity, its fragmentary, incomplete character. It suggests that this text is part of a greater whole, still incomplete, or one that cannot be grasped. In this sense Śreniowski refers to the topos of inexpressibility of the Holocaust experience. The text is reflective in character, full of metaphor, and its modernist style does not shun pathos. Thus we have here meditations emanating a poetic aura, not a report or an account of events. The author emphasises the desperate loneliness of the dying, their solitude, the incommensurability of the ghetto experience and that of the occupation, and the lack of a common fate of the Jews and the Poles (“A Deserted Town in a Living Capital”; “A Town within a Town”; “And the Capital? A Capital, in which the town of a death is dying . . . ? Well, the Capital is living a normal life. Under the occupation, indeed . . . .”).
Keywords
Warsaw Ghetto, Polish-Jewish relations, Warsaw Ghetto uprising
License
Copyright (c) 2005 Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
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