Cover of Holy Week: A Novel of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Holy Week: A Novel of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

At the height of the Nazi extermination campaign in the Warsaw Ghetto, a young Jewish woman, Irena, seeks the protection of her former lover, a young architect, Jan Malecki. By taking her in, he puts his own life and the safety of his family at risk. Over a four-day period, Tuesday through Friday of Holy Week 1943, as Irena becomes increasinglytraumatized by her situation, Malecki questions his decision to shelter Irena in the apartment where Malecki, his pregnant wife, and his younger brotherreside. Added to his dilemma is the broader context of Poles' attitudes toward the "Jewish question" and the plight of the Jews locked in the ghetto duringthe final moments of its existence.

Read more

Few fictional works dealing with the war have been written so close in time to the events that inspired them. No other Polish novel treats the range of Polish attitudes toward the Jews with such unflinching honesty.

Jerzy Andrzejewski's Holy Week (Wielki Tydzien, 1945), one of the significant literary works to be published immediately following the Second World War, now appears in English for the first time.

This translation of 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.

Audience
adult
Length
short · 152 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked Holy Week: A Novel of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked Holy Week: A Novel of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. The Train to Warsaw Shares historical fiction, Holocaust, Poland
  2. Anya Shares historical fiction, World War II, Holocaust
  3. The Warsaw Anagrams Shares Holocaust, World War II, historical fiction
  4. The Wall Shares historical fiction, Holocaust, World War II

“If you want more of the same (historical fiction), start with these.”

  1. Run, Boy, Run
  2. The Puppet Boy Of Warsaw
  3. Wartime Lies
  4. The Book of Aron

“If it was the Poland that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. The Cracow Ghetto Pharmacy
  2. The Camp
  3. The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman
  4. A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. Free onlineFree Children of the Ghetto
  2. The Strange Ways of Providence In My Life: An Amazing Holocaust Survivor Rescue Story (World War 2 Memoirs)
  3. Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents
  4. Euripides' Bacchae, Focus Classical Library