given in ordered notes, gathered at the end of the volume.
Thanks are due to Andrzej Wajda for permitting the illustration of this work with stills from his 1996 film Wielki Tydzień. Julie Draskoczy and Helena Goscilo at the University of Pittsburgh commented helpfully on the translation, as did the editors at Ohio University Press. Ricky S. Huard, project editor at Ohio University Press, deserves credit as a virtual second translator. Facts concerning Jerzy Andrzejewski’s life are based primarily on Andrzejewski by Anna Synoradzka (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1997). The photograph of Andrzejewski was provided by the Muzeum Literatury in Warsaw.
Jerzy Andrzejewski. Photo courtesy of Muzeum Literatury, Warsaw
Note on the Author
JERZY ANDRZEJEWSKI (1909–83), one of modern Poland’s most versatile prose writers and one of the best known outside Poland, was born in Warsaw. He attended the University of Warsaw from 1927 to 1931, where he majored in Polish literature but left without receiving a degree. His first collection of short stories, Unavoidable Roads (Drogi nieukniknione), appeared in 1936, followed by the widely acclaimed novel Mode of the Heart (Ład serca). During the Second World War, he was active in the literary underground. His first postwar novels were Holy Week, published as part of the volume Night (Noc, 1945), and the much better known Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament, 1948), which dealt with the adjustments Poles had to make following their country’s forced entry into the Soviet sphere of influence. These works established Andrzejewski’s reputation as a writer of moral conflict and dilemma in the tradition of the French existentialists.
Before the war, Andrzejewski had been an outspoken opponent of the intrusion of politics into literature. In the early postwar years, however, he increasingly accommodated himself to the political reality of the time, joining the Polish United Workers’ Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza) in 1950. He soon thereafter published an infamous manifesto in which he subjected his previous work to criticism and pledged allegiance to Marxist doctrine. Throughout the early 1950s, he played the role of publicist and ardent spokesman for the party line.
The year 1954 found Andrzejewski politically sanitizing a new edition of Ashes and Diamonds, which became required reading in the schools. In the same year, however, he published a collection of short stories whose title piece, The Gold Fox (Złoty lis), is a thinly veiled critique of the oppressive effect of socialist reality on imagination, creativity, and interpersonal and family relations. This work became one of the literary landmarks of Poland’s literary and political “thaw” following the death of Stalin and preceded by a number of years the appearance of similar literature in the Soviet Union.
From that point on, Andrzejewski directed his literary and journalistic activities toward the goal of carving out for himself the role of spokesman for progressive currents in Polish cultural life. Darkness Covers the Earth (Ciemności kryją ziemię, 1957), a historical novel set in the time of the Spanish Inquisition, can be read without much imagination as a condemnation of the Stalinist mentality, the Communist political machine, and the doctrine of the ends justifying the means. For his efforts, Andrzejewski found himself and his works under increasingly harsh scrutiny and censorship, especially under the Gomułka regime through the late 1950s and 1960s.
In 1963 Andrzejewski was among the 34 signatories of a famous letter of protest to the Communist authorities over the stifling conditions then prevailing in Polish cultural life. In 1975 he was among the most active of the 101 signatories of a letter to the Constitutional Commission, protesting changes in the Polish constitution in favor of the Soviet Union. Andrzejewski was also among the first 14 members of the Workers’ Defense Committee (Komitet Obrony Robotników, KOR), which arose in response to the repression of worker strikes in 1976, a cornerstone of the Polish freedom movement that eventually culminated in the rise of the Solidarity trade union and the fall of Communism in Poland following the elections of 1989, an event the author did not live to see.
Between 1960 and 1980 Andrzejewski published a stream of new novels, a body of work remarkable for its stylistic and thematic variety, which secured for him a position as of one of Poland’s most significant twentieth-century novelists. Of greatest importance are The Gates of Paradise (Bramy raju, 1960), He Cometh Leaping upon the Mountains (Idzie skacząc po górach, 1963), The Appeal (Apelacja, 1967), Mishmash (Miazga, 1981), and Nobody (Nikt, 1982).
The author died of a heart attack in Warsaw in 1983 and is buried in Powązki cemetery.
Note on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
THE WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING was the largest and symbolically most important Jewish uprising during World War II and the first urban uprising in German-occupied Europe.
In the summer of 1942, around three hundred thousand Jews were deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka. When reports of the mass murder of the deportees leaked back, a group of survivors formed the Jewish Fighting Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa) under the command of Mordecai Anielewicz. Right-wing Zionists formed another resistance organization, the Jewish Fighting Union (Żydowski Związek Wojskowy). The two groups decided to cooperate to oppose German attempts to destroy the ghetto.
In January 1943, using a small supply of smuggled weapons, members of the Jewish resistance infiltrated a column of deportees and began firing upon the German troops. Although the Germans succeeded in deporting some five thousand to sixty-five hundred people, after a few days the troops retreated. This momentary victory inspired the ghetto fighters to prepare for future resistance, among other things by building a network of underground bunkers.
On April 19, 1943, German troops and police entered the ghetto to deport its remaining inhabitants, and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising began. Some 750 fighters, using mostly small arms and grenades smuggled into the ghetto by the Polish resistance, fought the heavily armed and well-trained German army.
On the third day of the uprising, in order to force the remaining Jews out of hiding, troops under the command of SS General Jürgen Stroop began to systematically burn the ghetto, building by building. Anielewicz and those with him were killed in an attack on his command bunker, which fell to German forces on May 8. By May 16, 1943, after nearly a month of resistance, the ghetto was in ruins and the revolt had ended. General Stroop ordered the Great Synagogue on Tłomacki Street destroyed as a symbol of German victory. Stroop reported that he had captured 56,065 Jews and destroyed 631 bunkers. He estimated that his units had killed as many as seven thousand Jews. Another seven thousand were deported to Treblinka to be killed. The remainder of the ghetto inhabitants were deported to the Poniatowa, Trawniki, and Majdanek concentration camps.
The last commander of the Jewish uprising, Marek Edelman, survived the war and became a prominent physician in Łódź. As of this writing, he is still alive and politically active.
INTRODUCTION
Jerzy Andrzejewski’s Holy Week
JERZY ANDRZEJEWSKI’S NOVEL Holy Week deserves recognition as one of the most significant 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 fictional 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