The Ethics of Witnessing: The Holocaust in Polish Writers' Diaries from Warsaw, 1939-1945

Chapter 4. Aurelia Wylezynska: Rethinking Art and Ethics in the Reality of the Holocaust

71 The wartime diary of Aurelia Wyleżyńska (1881–1944), scarcely mentioned in Polish research of the Holocaust,1 is practically unknown to the general public. Wyleżyńska was a well-known literary figure in the prewar and wartime Warsaw intellectual milieu. Yet, of all the Warsaw war diaries discussed in this book, only Wyleżyńska’s diary remains unpublished . This author of numerous prizewinning novels and biographies , of translations and journalistic writings, and above all, of an extraordinary wartime diary, has been all but forgotten.2 Wyleżyńska was born in 1881 in Podolia Governorate, at that time a province of the Russian Empire. From 1907 to 1911 she studied philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where she started her literary career, publishing essays and articles in popular magazines. After World War I, which she spent in Russia, she settled in Lwów, where she continued writing and was active in the Union of Professional Polish Writers. In 1924 she moved to Paris. She wrote for publications in Poland and was actively engaged in the Paris-based association Les Amis de la Pologne, gave lectures, and traveled extensively in Europe. Wyleżyńska returned to Poland in 1937 and settled in Warsaw. During the Occupation, she worked as a volunteer in a hospital, and was actively engaged in saving Jews. She also worked for the Polish underground and wrote articles and reviews for the clandestine press. Her patriotic determination to stay in Poland never faltered. Sometime in 1940, when the situation was getting worse, she decided to register as a permanent Warsaw resident and observed, “Finally the globetrotter Aurelia Wyleżyńska: Rethinking Art and Ethics in the Reality of the Holocaust chapter 4 72 aurelia wyleżyńska has settled down, and will remain in this land to the end. Now I am solidly tied to my first motherland, though there was a time when the second [France] was the foundation of my identity.” She was shot on the first day of the Warsaw Uprising, on August 1, 1944, and died on August 3. The manuscript of Wyleżyńska’s wartime diary, which was preserved by her sister Fela, is now in the National Library, Department of Rare Manuscripts, in Warsaw. The first section of the text, approximately 150 pages covering the period from September 27, 1939, to January 1, 1942, exists only in the original, which has been damaged; some pages are partly or completely illegible and, for the most part, it is impossible to decipher the dates of the entries. The remainder of the text, approximately 450 double-spaced pages covering January 2, 1942, to August 29, 1943, has been retyped; the dates are mostly legible. It seems likely that the final section of the diary has been lost.3 As a writer and a humanist, Wyleżyńska sought in her diary to assess the impact of German tyranny on the validity of humanistic ethics and on the relevance of art. The reality of the Occupation and the Holocaust disempowered existing norms of artistic representation, demanding new aesthetic modes not only to describe the sights and sounds of an unimaginable world of horror, but also to explore psychological and moral responses. But for Wyleżyńska, aesthetics could not be separated from ethics. Her search for an appropriate language of art dovetailed with the question of the steadfastness of humanistic values in a time of terror. She was increasingly appalled by the brutality of German rule and by the hostile indifference of the majority of Polish society to Jewish suffering. Her decision to devote herself altruistically to rescuing Jews confronted her with unforeseen complications. While defying the Germans and evading Polish collaborators and blackmailers, she also became aware of the increasingly complex pattern of her interactions with the Jews she was trying to protect. In her diary, Wyleżyńska made a conscious effort to distance herself from her self, becoming an analytical teller of the story of her ethical and psychological transformation. Her descriptions of her rescue operations in her diary, as well as of people and events, form a remarkably insightful narrative of the altered meaning of ethics in a reality of genocide. aurelia wyleżyńska 73 The Diary as Last Will and Testament Wyleżyńska explicitly expressed her intention to make a formal testament twice. On February 7, 1943, she wrote...