English
Polish
Stanislaw Sreniowski, From a Book of Madness And Atrocity
Jacek Leociak
jleociak@gmail.com Biofull 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
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) 2008 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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