Zofia Nałkowska’s Medallions (1946) – Book Review

‘There is a good reason why the style is the iron capital of her art and one of the very few exportables in our national literature. Nałkowska herself is style and there is no difference between the style of her books and her life’ – Witold Gombrowicz

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On the 10th of February 1945, Zofia Nałkowska wrote the final entry of her Wartime Diaries. Despite her position as the official writer of independent Poland, and an open anti-fascist, she had somehow survived the Warsaw occupation. This last entry reads: ‘Borejsza proposes that I become president of the Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes in Auschwitz’. Her 1947 work, Medallions, is the documentation of the findings. It is a product of the tension between memory and forgetting, between words and silence:

‘Nothing remains. And the whole thing for me can be encapsulated in this. Namely, that I write. And on this it ends. This is everything. And yet it is. By writing I salvage that which is. The rest is beyond my reach. The rest is relegated to silence.’ (May 1944)

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Medallions contains no ‘martyrs’ or ‘heros’ and Nalkowska pledges: ‘I wasn’t conscious of creating a new technique, a different literary mode from my other books. The theme alone, which is so difficult to grasp, so impossible to deal with emotionally, demanded that I use this realistic form of expression’. Refusing to employ excess to fulfill her authorial goal, Nalkowska’s fragmented reportages of the lives of Polish jews encompass testimonies from Nazis, Holocaust witnesses and Holocaust survivors, thus allowing these people to speak for themselves. The humanist intimations of the work lie in our evident judgement. They are deeper than words or style, and seem for Nalkowska passionately ‘unconscious’.

As Witold Gombrowicz (a contemporary of Nałkowska) confirms, there is no difference for her between style and life. Her style is ‘iron’ and much like her prose in this collection, it is resolute and imbued with value. She writes historically and objectively, neither omitting nor amplifying what is real, corporal and visceral. But something of her being still remains in the text; behind lines that represent reality and the words that align with truth is her silent determination to preserve. The humanity of her mission bleeds into the stories and, as she would remind us, there is no place for anything else: ‘people dealt this fate to people’.

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Medallions’ reportages are a historically significant, damning, and essential work in the battle of memory against forgetting (A battle described by author Milan Kundera as that of ‘man against power’). While these harrowing documentations were the writer’s conscious, and most important goal, the work’s hidden, humanistic side is perhaps a reason for its continued relevance. Polish writer Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s conclusion seems apt here. It communicates more succinctly in two lines the importance of Nalkowska’s work than in the several dozen of this review.

‘Only from deep wisdom and great feeling are such works, which on the surface seem restrained and cool, but in reality are burning and passionate born’

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The writer whose aforementioned ‘wisdom’ and ‘feeling’ lay behind Medallions is best known in Europe as a Holocaust writer but in fact holds many other important contributions in Polish literature. She was also an author of psychological fiction, drama, and several essays on eroticism and feminism. I hope to explore these (more cheerful) works at another time.

Leon Friedman