Immediately after the war, some Auschwitz reports that belong already to the Canon of camp literature and the evidence, without any literary stylization of the full extent of the horror from a female perspective appeared in Poland. Three of the four in Poland, best-known books were published in 1946. There was “medallions” by Zofia Nalkowska, a collection of eight short, almost laconic Reports, which were collected by the author as a member of the main Commission for the research of the Nazi crimes; their Motto is “This has been the fate of prepares people for the people” is still one of the most cited descriptions of that time.
The other came out “In hell” by Zofia Kossak: The initiator and co-founder of the “Zegota” the Council for the support of the Jews, was imprisoned between October 1943 and April 1944, in Auschwitz-Birkenau. After that, it was as Sentenced to death back in the Warsaw Pawiak-prison, from which they could be bought from the Warsaw representative of the Polish government-in-exile free, whereupon they went to Czestochowa, where she wrote in the Winter of 1944/45 your camp memories. And for the third it was was “Where in the past the birch trees were” of Krystyna Zywulska, as the Pseudonym of the Jew, Sonia Landau. After she escaped in 1942 from the Warsaw ghetto, she had joined the Polish resistance, was arrested by the Gestapo and sentenced to death. Finally, they came but as a political prisoner to Auschwitz, where they worked, among other things, the registration of the arriving deportees and, later, much-acclaimed poems wrote. During the evacuation managed to escape her.
a book as A piece of evidence for the Nuremberg trials
As the First but still in the year 1945, published under the title Of “smoke over Birkenau”, the carefully-composed, relentlessly detailed, bearing memories of the young poet, Seweryna Szmaglewska, who was imprisoned in Birkenau from 1942 to 1945. Also, she was able to escape during the death March from Auschwitz to gross-Rosen, and as soon as they reached their home town of Piotrkow Trybunalski, she began immediately to write to your book. “I did it almost on a somnambulistic way,” she would tell later: “I got up every day at five, and wrote, in a train till dusk, with only a short break for a modest lunch. In this style of work, the manuscript grew very quickly in size. About half a year later the book was done.“
At the Nuremberg war crimes trial belonged to her report, the times’s own point of view, from the perspective of other prisoners, the daily life in Birkenau, describes, “each of the women is an Atom in a large uncoordinated Structure, called the camp” – to the pieces of evidence, which the International military court of justice templates. Szmaglewska was the only Polish woman that occurred in the process as a witness, what you described in the seventies in another book (“The Innocent of Nuremberg”). Your stock-Text was for decades required reading in Polish schools, and has been translated into several languages: English, Dutch, Spanish, Russian, Czech, and even Mongolian.
