The article offers an analysis of the fate of an Upper Silesian child in the totalitarian period (Nazi occupation, Stalinist period). Physically kidnapped by the occupier and taken over by his family or indoctrinated at
school or other educational institutions, it was most often subjected to excluding models of teaching in the Polish or German spirit. Often the methods of formation were sophisticated – children were bribed, tempted, and seduced. The analysis of this situation is based on the interpretation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem Erlkönig, in which the dominant feature is the struggle for the soul of a child between a natural ally (parent) and an adversary who comes from the outside (king); the vision of the elven kingdom is juxtaposed
with the totalitarian utopia of a society – racially strong and perfect, or with the vision of Poland – a society devoid of differences, and at the same time perfectly anti-German. Various kinds of texts were taken into consideration documentary (R. Hrabar, A. Malinowska, G. Gruschka), quasi-documentary (J. Durski, F. Netz, A. Lysko) and literary (A. Dziewit-Meller, L. Libera, I. Villqist).

In the article, the author reflects on the theme of a garden present in books written from the perspective of a child by Shoah survivors, representatives of wealthy, Polonised Jewish families. The materials for analysis were texts written at the end of the 20th century: a novel by Roma Ligocka The Girl in a Red Coat, and memoirs by Janina Bauman (Winter in the Morning) and Yehuda Nir (The Lost Childhood).
The garden present in selected books is a place that has a strong influence on the characters, a place that is real or present in stories, and a place the reader gets to know in the process of reading (e.g. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodges Burnett). The shape of this space is determined by people: founders and heirs, professional gardeners, but also casual users or even barbarians and vandals. The analysed books present the following gardens: a city park, a botanical garden, family gardens, allotment gardens, and finally a vegetable garden. Some of them exist only as names, others are described in more detail, and even seem to participate in the fate of protagonists. These spaces are important to the city’s topography, family history, or the history of an individual. They provide settings and determine – but also project – the behaviour of the characters; finally, they become a testimony to what is gone. Invoked in memoirs and stories about the times of the Holocaust, they confirm their importance in the wartime lives of children and adolescents.

The article offers an analysis of Svetlana Alexievich’s Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II as a history of war from a child’s perspective. Giving the voice to those whose childhood fell on wartime and occupation is a step towards discovering children’s wartime experience as well as a gesture against its ideologisation and politicisation. The protagonists’ memories assembled in the reportage allow us to recreate the children’s point of view about the aforementioned events, which usually remains omitted from the official historical discourse shaped in the USSR.

The article aims to analyse and interpret the topic of poverty in the memories of Frank McCourt (Angela’s Ashes and ‘Tis). Using sociological literature by, i.a, Ruth Lister and Zygmunt Bauman, the study presents the biography of the protagonist and his mother, marked by the phenomenon of inherited poverty. Drawing attention to the problem of irony and intertextuality in the literary works, the author argues that language is insufficient to express the experience of poverty and to be individualised from its system. The author of the article puts forward the thesis that the Irish writer’s dilogy is only seemingly of a confessional and personal nature, being more a story about the universal fate of an Irishman, a person affected by the problem of poverty.

The aim of this article is to analyse childhood wounds of Joe Jacobs, the protagonist of Deborah Levy’s novel Swimming Home, through the prism of psychoanalytically grounded trauma studies. By means of studying Jacobs’s family life and his precarious relationship with Kitty Finch, a woman he has just met, I demonstrate how trauma and an unceasing sense of homelessness construct the protagonist’s identity. I note that Jacobs, a Holocaust survivor, strives for – but is incapable of – coming home, while Kitty functions as a mirror that reflects his repressed self-knowledge. As it turns out at the end of the novel, it is Kitty who guides him home: home which, as a locus of trauma, happens to be accessible only through death.

This article aims to provide an interpretation of Barbara Klicka’s novel Zdrój [Spring]. It is analysed through Sigmund Freud’s concept of trauma and Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. The purpose of this article is to examine the impact of childhood trauma on the adult subject’s psychic structure and to explore lingual strategies used to sustain her defence against structural violence.

This article is a detailed comparative analysis of the attitudes and behaviour of Julka and Oliwia, two characters of Anna Cieplak’s novel Ma być czysto. I am particularly interested in a literary interpretation of chosen plots in sociological and psychological contexts. I assume the moment of a person’s transformation from a child into an adult is of particular importance to one’s identity development. It is at times difficult and teenagers often require family or institutional support. The article is going to pay special attention to the opportunities the characters’ growing up environment offers, trying to display one of the novel’s main themes, that is, social inequality and its influence on the teenagers’ individual development.

The article is an attempt to combine art therapy, especially fairy tale therapy, with narrative medicine. The text also constitutes an introduction to the concept of narrative art therapy proposed by the author. Two case studies are examined in the article in order to demonstrate the benefits arising from the collaboration of a humanist doctor and a bibliotherapist.