di Fiori.” The apartment house became the model for the setting of Jan Malecki’s surprise encounter with Irena Lilien on the first day of the Jewish uprising.
The church at Wawrzyszew. Photo by O. Swan
Andrzejewski later moved with Maria, who was by that time pregnant with their son Marcin, to a house in the northern Warsaw suburb of Bielany, the site of the fictional villa populated by Jan, his pregnant wife, and a cross-section of other Warsaw inhabitants ranging from the seedy and bigoted Piotrowski family to the landlord Zamojski, with his aristocratic last name, elegant library, and liveried servant. Warsaw streetcar number 17, which Jan rides to and from town, still wends its way from Mokotów in the south, through downtown, and along the ghost walls of the ghetto, to arrive finally in Bielany, now more firmly incorporated into the city limits than it was in 1943. To the west of Bielany still lies the settlement of Wawrzyszew, with its connected ponds and small church near which Anna prays.
The fictional name Irena Lilien may have been taken from a family with whom the author briefly stayed in Lwów following his flight from Warsaw in 1939. Andrzejewski himself stated that her character was modeled on Janina Askenazy, the daughter of the renowned historian Szymon Askenazy. Most others have identified the prototype as Wanda Wertenstein, Andrzejewski’s companion from 1941 to 1943, a prominent Polish postwar film critic. Irena’s picture is undoubtedly a composite.
Andrzejewski has been characterized by Czesław Miłosz as a dramatist in a novelist’s garb. Indeed, the novel’s action takes place within a compressed period of time, Tuesday through Friday of Holy Week, and largely within the confines of the Maleckis’ Bielany apartment, from which forays into the city provide an ever-changing dramatic contrast. The action is propelled almost entirely by the direct speech of the characters, whose every utterance is accompanied by such specific descriptions of voice, tone, gesture, and attitude as to make the transformation of the novel into a play or film seem anticipated. Wajda’s film transcribes entire passages from the novel nearly verbatim.
The characters also seem chosen according to the principle of dramatic economy: each represents a type, and no type is represented by more than one character. The three main characters (leaving aside Irena for the moment)—the architect Malecki, his wife Anna, and his younger brother Julek—seem typecast according to the canons 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
