of Polish literature stretching back to the nineteenth century. Irena herself, whose options for action are limited by external circumstances, and who therefore plays a passive and reactive role, is not so much a literary stereotype as she is a lost individual, hounded and doomed by an unjust fate.
Malecki is the ratiocinating and rationalizing liberal. He has all the right instincts and sensibilities but is unable to act on them in a direct and timely fashion. In his occasional moments of clarity he realizes that his every move has been taken in service of his own ease and comfort. Anna is the veritable embodiment of the Matka Polka (Polish Mother)—warm, nurturing, instinctively moral, deeply religious, and committed to family and fatherland (ojczyzna). Julek is Malecki’s polar opposite in all ways, including his rejection of hearth and home for the national cause. Although the character has been criticized for being left-leaning, nothing Julek says allows one to pin a specific political affiliation on him. His values lie outside himself, and he is committed to giving them embodiment through action.
Andrzejewski would have been among the last to downplay Poland’s heroic resistance to the German occupation or the suffering endured by the Polish population at large; in fact, this suffering is a major motif in the novel. Anna Malecka loses almost her entire family in the war, whether in the initial invasion, in prison camps, or through random misfortune. One may add to this the barely alluded-to tragedies of the Makarczyński and Makowski families and the unnamed next-door neighbors taken away in the middle of the night. Thousands of instances have been documented in which Poles risked their own lives and those of others to save and shelter Jews, more than in any other country. Authorial honesty, however, demanded that not every moment of a novel about the ghetto uprising be draped in the national flag. Not every Pole played the role of hero; among them were extortionists, informers, collaborators, and outright fascists and Nazi sympathizers. The Polish underground resistance group Żegota, while sympathetic to the Jewish cause, judged that the time was not yet ripe for a general open revolt against the Nazis and provided only token help to the insurgents: handguns and a few rifles and hand grenades. Most Poles, even if they were troubled about the plight of the Jews, went through the war as did Jan Malecki—carefully, one step at a time, doing their everyday jobs and looking after their own interests. Often they were successful in tiptoeing around disaster, though sometimes they were not.
Much of Polish literature is inaccessible to a broader audience, not only because of the language barrier but also because of the specific national problems occupying the minds of many Polish writers. Such criticism cannot be raised with respect to Holy Week, which is, perhaps, more easily appreciated by an English-speaking readership than by the postwar Polish audience for whom the novel was originally intended.
Guide to Pronunciation
THE FOLLOWING KEY provides a guide to the pronunciation of Polish words and names.
a is pronounced as in father
c as ts in cats
ch like a guttural h, as in German Bach
cz as hard ch in church
g (always hard) as in get
i as ee, as in meet
j as y, as in yellow
rz as hard zh, as in French jardin
sz as hard sh, as in ship
szcz as hard shch, as in fresh cheese
u as oo, as in boot
w as v, as in vat
ć as soft ch, as in cheap
ś as soft sh, as in sheep
ż as hard zh, as in French jardin
ź both as soft zh, as in seizure
ó as oo, as in boot
ą as a nasal, as in French on
ę as a nasal, as in French en
ł as w, as in way
ń as ny, as in canyon
The accent in Polish words always falls on the penultimate syllable.
Holy Week
Chapter 1
JAN MALECKI HAD NOT seen Irena Lilien for quite some time. As late as the summer of 1941, they still had seen a good deal of each other. By that time, the Liliens had been driven out of their home in Smug; but the German occupation authorities were not yet taking harsher measures against the Jews, so the Liliens, having paid off the necessary people, had avoided confinement in the Warsaw Ghetto. They had even managed to rescue some of their things, and with this remainder of their belongings, still quite sizable and valuable, the entire family moved closer to Warsaw.
The Liliens, who before the war had been people of means—and for several generations, at that—were possessed of such a deeply developed sense of security that, even in the new and critical situation in which they now found themselves, it did not occur to them to move to a different suburb. Zalesinek, where they rented an apartment, was located about a quarter of the way to Smug, and many people along the commuter line knew the Liliens, whether personally or by sight. They had become so much a part of Polish culture and customs that they had no idea they might arouse suspicion by their outward appearance.
Fortunately, the oldest generation of Liliens, the banker and his wife, did not travel to Warsaw. She, an immense, fat Jewish woman, had been incapacitated for a number of years and never left her wheelchair. Her husband, long ago having withdrawn from affairs at the bank, contented himself by sitting in the sun or, on rainy or cold days, by watching people play bridge. But his son Professor Lilien, his wife, and their daughter, Irena, still traveled to Warsaw as often as before. Mrs. Lilien attracted relatively little attention. Small, slender, and quiet, with irregular but pleasant features, she could pass for Aryan. It was much worse for the professor and Irena.
Irena went into Warsaw several times a week. She visited friends and acquaintances—and a desire to see Malecki occasioned other trips as well. She loved her social life and an atmosphere of fun; she liked to arrange meetings in the bars and cafés that were so fashionable during the war. Irena Lilien was very pretty: tall, dark-haired, and dark-complexioned. Her coarse, thick hair and eastern eyes, however, were strikingly Jewish. When Malecki explained that she ought to be more careful, Irena just laughed and said that the Germans knew nothing of such things. Of course, at that time, incidences of extortion by Poles already had begun to occur, but Irena did not take seriously the possibility of such a thing ever happening to her or to those close to her. Her beauty, and the social position to which she had been born and to which she had become accustomed, lent her a sense of security from all danger.
Professor Lilien, for other reasons, having more to do with his upbringing, likewise did not take seriously the possibility that anything could happen to him. The war had shaken him very badly. The triumph of bestiality over regard for human life put his innate humanity and liberalism to a hard test, but he emerged from it with an unswerving belief in life and in human progress. However, the defense of those threatened values cost him dearly. Juliusz Lilien, gifted with a remarkable historical intuition and imagination, was bereft of any imagination at all with regard to his own fate or that of those closest to him. There are people who, having attained a high position in society, cannot imagine the existence of any power capable of casting them down and depriving them of what they have achieved. Lilien was just such a person. Even after being driven from Smug and forced to exchange his luxurious and spacious villa1 for three sublet rooms, deprived of his library, servants, and creature comforts, he remained in his sensibilities the same person he had been before the war: the scion of an old and wealthy family, a justly renowned historian, an oft-named university master and dean, and a member of various scholarly societies both in Poland and abroad. In the public mind, Lilien was reputed to be a Mason of some distinction, but whether he really was—and, if