Lexington Books
Pages: 198
Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜
978-1-66691-693-5 • Hardback • October 2023 • $95.00 • (£73.00)
978-1-66691-694-2 • eBook • October 2023 • $45.00 • (£35.00)
Bozena Karwowska is professor in the department of Central, Eastern and Northern European studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Human Body in the Concentration Camp
Chapter 2: Reading Women’s Auschwitz Literature. Seweryna Szmaglewska’s Smoke over Birkenau - Then and Now
Chapter 3: Bystander as a Witness. Wiesław Kielar and his Anus Mundi
Chapter 4: Writing an Auschwitz Memoir as an Autobiography
Chapter 5: Tadeusz Borowski – The Education of a Writer
Chapter 6: Prostitution in the Space of Violence
Chapter 7: Mapping Auschwitz: Space, Memory, Narration
Coda
Bibliography
In a powerful and immensely readable study, Holocaust scholar Bozena Karwowska examines memory-based literary works written in Polish during the early post-war period. Focusing on Auschwitz, she uses language, theory, and history, to examine various "bodily" aspects of the prisoners' lives and camp experiences. Beginning with the concept that the body was the only possession of the prisoners, she moves from specific texts to under-researched aspects of camp lives, illuminating them through a close reading of gendered literature, including prisoners accounts of sexual exploitation and sexual violence in the camp. The result is a fascinating piece of cutting-edge scholarship that uses a critical reexamination of forgotten texts to present the prisoners' body in Auschwitz as both situation and space, while simultaneously showing how survivors constituted themselves soon after liberation as witnesses.
— Judy Tydor Baumel-Schwartz, Bar Ilan University