Holy Week - Jerzy Andrzejewski Polish and Polish-American Studies Series

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in major works of literary criticism, including, among others, The Captive Mind, which his friend Miłosz wrote after going into exile in the West.

      Holy Week gives artistic representation to what became for a number of distinguished Polish intellectuals a dramatic realization—the abandonment of the Jews to Nazi persecution by the dominant Polish society. Naturally, the story line of Holy Week and its moral and existential dilemmas are all-important for the development of the individual characters. But of crucial importance in the narrative is the background of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. A number of great Polish writers (notably Adolf Rudnicki and Mieczysław Jastrun, both of whom were assimilated Jews) have noted the callous indifference of Warsaw’s inhabitants to the tragic fate of the insurgents and the remaining residents of the ghetto. A steady shower of ashes sifted down for days from a cloudless sky as German SS and police detachments charged with suppressing the uprising set fire to this part of the city, and to its Jewish population, creating the greatest conflagration in Warsaw’s history.

      In addition to Andrzejewski’s novel, which offered the first artistic examination of the drama, the events of the ghetto uprising inspired works by other writers. Miłosz wrote a stunning poem on the subject published after the war in his volume The Rescue (Ocalenie). Miłosz and Andrzejewski were the closest of friends during the Second World War, which they endured together in Warsaw. They worked together—quite literally, for it was a handmade edition of only a few dozen copies—on the underground publication of Miłosz’s Poems (Wiersze), written under the pseudonym Jan Syruć. The imagination and sensitivity of the two friends were tuned in the same key. They saw each other every day, and when Andrzejewski moved with his family to a larger apartment across town from the Miłoszes, they wrote long letters to each other, which Miłosz published much later in a volume of correspondence, Legends of Modernity (Legendy nowoczesności).

      After 1956, following the period of “thaw” and de-Stalinization in the Soviet bloc countries, Andrzejewski became one of the most outspoken members of the critical intelligentsia. In time he turned in his party card, signed petitions demanding greater freedom of expression in artistic and political fields, and was recognized as an iconic figure of intellectual opposition to the Communist regime in Poland. When Poland joined with other Soviet bloc countries in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia—to suppress Alexander Dubček’s “socialism with a human face” and the liberalization of the Czechoslovak regime—Andrzejewski wrote a public letter of apology and solidarity addressed to Eduard Goldstücker, president of the Czechoslovak Union of Writers, which had been at the forefront of the movement for reform. In 1976, he was among the founders of the Workers’ Defense Committee (Komitet Obrony Robotników, KOR) in Poland, an unprecedented initiative in which intellectuals openly provided legal and financial assistance to workers repressed by the Communist regime after a wave of strikes. KOR transformed politics in the Soviet bloc and led directly to the formation of the Solidarity movement in August 1980.

      Jerzy Andrzejewski’s creative powers slowly waned, succumbing to alcoholism. In spite of his progressively incapacitating illness, he left a formidable oeuvre that is compelling not only because of his skills as a storyteller but because, like all great literature of the twentieth century, it bears testimony to the fragility of the human condition.

      Jan T. Gross Princeton University

      Series Editor’s Preface

      JERZY ANDRZEJEWSKI MAY BE best known in the West as the author of the screenplay for Ashes and Diamonds, the great postwar film by Polish director Andrzej Wajda. Andrzejewski, though, was a monumental figure in post–World War II Polish literature with both a broad canon of work in literature and a heroic record of participation in Poland’s anti-Communist Solidarity movement.

      Among Andrzejewski’s many achievements was a little book, ironically titled Holy Week, which arguably ranks among his most interesting and significant works. Although virtually unknown among English-language readers, Holy Week merits attention as one of the first attempts by Polish intellectuals during the postwar period to confront the problem of anti-Semitism in Polish society.

      Holy Week, which we publish here for the first time in English translation, is a troubling story of failed human possibilities set against the backdrop of the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazis. It is a story of love and fear, of ethnic bigotry and Christian charity, of heroism and victimhood, of human weakness and societal limits. As such, it draws out moral lessons—for persons and peoples—about the toll that prejudice takes on individuals’ humanity and on national self-identity. In its own imperfect way, it marked the beginning of a great national moral self-examination in Poland, one that has proceeded only in fits and starts since the end of the war but has gained momentum since the end of Poland’s Communist regime and, in large measure, has revolutionized Polish national values and sensibilities regarding the country’s Jewish minority.

      In bringing out this edition of Holy Week at this time, we hope to encourage a continuation of the dialogue and introspection inspired by the papal visits to the former Nazi German concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, the recent publication of such works as Jan Gross’s Neighbors, and the revival of Jewish culture in contemporary Poland, as well as by other political events and developments in Polish society that suggest some resurgence in right-wing Polish nationalism. We no less believe that the publication of this work also should serve to honor and memorialize its author and other Poles possessed of the courage and integrity to plumb this dark recess within the otherwise noble heart of their country. May it also warn just and righteous men and women of all nations, creeds, and races against intolerance in thought, words, and deeds now and in the future.

      Publication of the Ohio University Press Polish and Polish-American Studies Series marks a milestone in the maturation of the Polish studies field and stands as a fitting tribute to the scholars and organizations whose efforts have brought it to fruition. Supported by a series advisory board of accomplished Polonists and Polish-Americanists, the Polish and Polish-American Studies Series has been made possible through generous financial assistance from the Polish American Historical Association, the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, the Stanislaus A. Blejwas Endowed Chair in Polish and Polish American Studies at Central Connecticut State University, and the Piast Institute and through institutional support from Wayne State University and Ohio University Press. Publication of this particular series volume has been aided by a grant from the Richard D. and Mary Jane Edwards Endowed Publication Fund at the University of Pittsburgh, the home institution of the volume’s principal translator, Professor Oscar Swan, whose efforts to bring this project to fruition also should be especially recognized here. The series meanwhile has benefited from the warm encouragement of a number of other persons, including Gillian Berchowitz, M. B. B. Biskupski, the late Stanislaus A. Blejwas, Mary Erdmans, Thaddeus Gromada, James S. Pula, Thaddeus Radzilowski, and David Sanders. The moral and material support from all of these institutions and individuals is gratefully acknowledged.

       John J. Bukowczyk

      Acknowledgments and Notes on the Translation

      THIS TRANSLATION OF Jerzy Andrzejewski’s Holy Week began as a group project in an advanced Polish language course at the University of Pittsburgh. Class members Daniel M. Pennell, Anna M. Poukish, and Matthew J. Russin contributed to the translation; the instructor, Oscar E. Swan, was responsible for the overall accuracy and stylistic unity of the translation as well as for the biographical and critical notes and essays.

      Polish first names are preserved in the form in which they appear in the text (whether Anna or Ania, Józef, Józek, or Józio, for example). The last names of female characters, normally ending in -ska, -cka, are given as -ski, -cki when preceded by titles, otherwise as -ska, -cka; hence Mrs. Piotrowski, but Piotrowska, both referring to the same person. For the most part, place names have not been anglicized, except for Warsaw, the Vistula River, and occasional other instances where straightforward English translations suggest themselves, for example, Savior Square for Plac Zbawiciela, or Saxon Garden for Ogród Saski. The translators identified a number of instances where they felt

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