Holy Week: A Novel of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Introduction. Jerzy Andrzejewski’s Holy Week

introduction ||| Jerzy Andrzejewski’s Holy Week Jerzy Andrzejewski’s novel Holy Week deserves recognition as one of the most signi¤cant literary works to appear in Poland in the years immediately after the war. Its absorbing and tightly knit plot, its nearly documentary realism, and the momentous nature of the subject matter—the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943—set it apart from its contemporaries. Few ¤ctional works dealing with the Second World War have been written so close in time to the events themselves. None treats as honestly the range of Polish attitudes toward the Jews at the height of the Nazi extermination campaign. Andrzejewski’s novel, or novella, has been infrequently reprinted. It has not been widely translated into languages other than German (editions in 1948, 1950, 1964, and 1966). The relative popularity of the work in Germany probably stems from the fact that it is a story about the Holocaust in which Poles, not Germans, are the primary actors. The 1993 Polish edition, on which the present translation is based, lists the dates of the novel as 1943–45; the two years refer to two different versions of the same story. The earlier and shorter version was never published, and its manuscript has not surfaced. It is known only from the recollections of listeners to whom it was read in secret wartime literary gatherings. Apparently it focused on the moral dilemma of the protagonist , Jan Malecki, a recently married Pole upon whom is thrust the decision whether to shelter a Jewish woman acquaintance. Andrzejewski had always been an outspoken critic of anti-Semitism. One possible factor prompting him to rewrite the ¤rst version of Holy Week, giving greater prominence to the largely apathetic attitude of the Poles toward the Jewish uprising, was the appearance in the immediate postwar period of anti-Jewish manifestations across the south of Poland, particularly in Rzeszów, Tarnów, and Kraków. The statement of the fascist Zalewski, that one can be grateful to Hitler for having resolved the “Jewish question,” mirrors declarations made at various postwar right-wing political gatherings. In Holy Week, as in many of Andrzejewski’s works, personal considerations begin to overshadow abstract questions of right and wrong and to affect You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. xx | Introduction the decision-making ability of the main character. Jan Malecki feels increasingly estranged from the irritating Jewish woman, Irena Lilien, with whom he had once been close, and wonders whether he has done the right thing by risking the safety of his family (his wife, Anna, is pregnant) to save her. Irena, for her part, has been inalterably changed by the traumas of her wartime experiences . A member of a prominent, privileged, and acculturated Jewish family of banking and academe before the war, she has been forced for the¤rst time in her life to think of herself as a Jew, because that is how others now view her. Importantly for the plot, Irena has a distinctively Semitic appearance. The rewritten version of the novel adds to the personal dilemma of the central character the broader context of Poles’ attitudes toward the “Jewish question” and the plight of the Jews locked in the ghetto during the ¤nal moments of its existence in 1943. In both its versions, Holy Week by all accounts went over among listeners and readers like a lead balloon. Critics passed over the work largely in silence. Andrzej Wajda’s ¤lm version of the novel, issued some ¤fty years later in 1995, had a similar reception. Andrzejewski’s work touched—and still touches—a number of raw nerves, which one would do well to enumerate here. Poles, having lost a greater percentage of their people than any other nation in a Holocaust in which percentages and numbers ceased to have meaning , were in no mood in 1945 to read about a temporizing hero’s vacillations over whether to harbor a Jew during the war. Even less interested were they in reading about Polish anti-Semitism, the whole gamut of which is openly and honestly displayed on the pages of this novel, seemingly for the ¤rst time in all of Polish literature. For their part, Jewish readers were loath to appreciate a novel on the ghetto uprising as seen from the outside, whose protagonists were Poles and in...