View 2008: Holocaust Studies and Materials

2008: Holocaust Studies and Materials

ISSN:
1895-247X
eISSN:
2657-3571

Publication date:
2008-11-02

Section: Materials

Stanislaw Sreniowski, From a Book of Madness And Atrocity

Jacek Leociak

jleociak@gmail.com

full professor in the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, head of the Holocaust Literature Studies Department of the Institute of Literary Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, member of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, editor of the Holocaust. Studies and Materials annual. Together with Barbara Engelking he is a scholarly supervisor of the Holocaust gallery in the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Interested in various forms of recording limit experiences (including the Holocaust experience). Recently published Ratowanie. Opowieści Polaków i Żydów (2010), Spojrzenia na warszawskie getto (2011), the new, amended, improved and extended edition of Getto warszawskie. Przewodnik po nieistniejącym mieście (2013, together with Barbara Engelking) (English edition: The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City), and Biografie ulic. O ulicach Warszawy od narodzin po Zagładę (2017).

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1471-6926

Institite of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences

Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, 2008: Holocaust Studies and Materials, pages: 312-316

Publication date: 2008-12-01

https://doi.org/10.32927/ZZSiM.86

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 . . . .”).

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Leociak, J. (2008). Stanislaw Sreniowski, From a Book of Madness And Atrocity. Zagłada Żydów. Studia I Materiały, 312-316. https://doi.org/10.32927/ZZSiM.86

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                            View 2008: Holocaust Studies and Materials

2008: Holocaust Studies and Materials

ISSN:
1895-247X
eISSN:
2657-3571

Data publikacji:
2008-11-02

Dział: Materials