Abstract

“The wail of the genes”. Magdalena Grzebałkowska: 1945. Wojna i pokój. Warszawa, Biblioteka Gazety Wyborczej, 2015, ss. 413. Anna Janko: Mała zagłada. Kraków, Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2015, ss. 259.

In her review the author compares the narrations about the war and the Shoah which were published in 2015: a report by Magdalena Grzebałkowska entitled 1945. Wojna i pokój and
Mała zagłada by Anna Janko. The basis of the comparison is constituted by the Shoah of the Jews as the common, although secondary theme of both books, its influence upon the social
imagination and the rhetoric of both narrations. Apart from indicating the strong points of the narrations, which include an in‑depth study of the archive materials associated with the end of the war (Grzebałkowska) or the presentation of the problem – which was hardly present in the writings devoted to the war and occupation in Poland (the pacification of the village Sochy in the Zamojszczyzna region in 1943, of which Janko’s family fell victim), Marta Tomczok directs her attention to the weaknesses of such discourse, especially in reference to Mała zagłada. These weaknesses include: the intensification of the suffering of the recipient, effected through the juxtaposition in one book of the greatest massacres of children in the history of the world and the rhetoric of the Shoah transposed into the area of the stories about the war sufferings of the Poles. Janko presents both narrations, the Polish and the Jewish one, as mutually competitive.