There Used to Be a Jewish Women, There Is No More Jewish Woman Now (Była Żydówka, nie ma Żydówki)

Abstract

Content and Interpretation Rather than writing about his own camp experiences, Pankowski’s work consists in the writer’s reflections on the stories of other survivors from a perspective of about sixty years after the war. In fourteen formally and materially diverse parts, Pankowski tells the story of the only survivor from the town of N., a Jewish girl by the name of Fajga Oberlender, who survived thanks to her mother’s cleverness and the help of her neighbours. As Arkadiusz Morawiec points out, this is a story inspired by the wartime experiences of the writer’s own wife, Regina Pankowska, who died in 1972. Regina Pankowska, née Fern, left Lviv in 1944 to take part in the Warsaw Uprising, marrying Marian Pankowski in 1950 (the name “Fajga” is ostensibly connected to Regina for sentimental reasons). The first part of the story concerns the protagonist’s journey in 1950 to the fictional city of Azojville, U. S. – possibly a pseudonym for Asheville, North Carolina – where she is to present her survival story to members of the Association of Eastern European Jews. In this sense, Pankowski bases his story on a formula with universal appeal – or in any case, with an American audience in mind. She tells them how her mother saved her by dropping her from the railway embankment as she and other Jewish residents of their village were boarding a train to the death camps. Later, with the help of a Polish friend, she hid in a shed. The essence of Pankowski’s story is not the literary transposition of testimony, but a gesture that consists in problematising the manner in which stories of the Holocaust are told. It is a gesture that speaks not only to the narratives that circulate among American Jews, but to those about antisemitic pseudo-scholars, and to attitudes of Polish villagers towards the Holocaust: “For us Christians, the priest commands us to love thy neighbour as thyself. Anyway, Jews cannot become our fellow men. Jews are definitely alone” (Pankowski, 2008, pp. 29–30). “On the Aging of Events and Jews Stripped of Their Humanity” is a pastiche of the attitude of the “typical” Pole who, despite the Holocaust, still considers Jews to be for-