Doctor Josef’s Beauty (Ślicznotka doktora Josefa)

Content and Interpretation The story focuses on two twin sisters, Leokadia and Czechna, who live together in a retirement home not far fromWarsaw. Themain storyline is short on action as it is based on descriptions of the lives and destinies of retirement home residents of Jewish origin, who are suffering an extraordinary hot summer. The atmosphere can be described as monotonous but somehow also familiar and laconic since most of the conversations are about the death which the elderly residents are about to face. (“And you wanna get buried or burnt?” Rudzka, 2006, pp. 146, 152, 183). The subject of death is not only evoked several times by the pensioners, but also by the life-threatening heat, which gets more intense during the story. The narrator’s voice comments on this as follows: “The elderly people were spoiling fast. They had cancer. Exanthemas. Abscesses. Boils. As if they had cellulite on their faces. Dribbling. Sweating. Puffing. Trembling. Whimpering.” (p. 271) Additionally, the head of the retirement home is portrayed as unusually strict and lacking compassion or indulgence. He cuts off the water supply in order to save water, makes the residents stand in a row to get showered or arbitrarily sends people to the “House by the Sea” that nobody has ever seen and from which nobody ever has returned. This basic plot is constantly interwoven with flashbacks to World War II and the sisters’ fate in the Auschwitz concentration camp. They survived only because they were test subjects for doctor Josef (Mengele)’s experiments on twins (→ At Home with the Hitlers. The Hitlers’ Kitchen). “He is approaching her again. doctor Josef. Slim. Heavenly. Not present. [...] Laughing. Loudly. Vociferously. Like a boy. Laughing with his lips. The greedy ones. The sucking ones. [...] He wants her to stretch out. To lay her naked shoulders on the metal bar that is covered with the excrement of strangers.” (pp. 204–205) Not only the narrator focuses on the detailed description of bodies; Czechna herself also emphasises her beauty and the fact that she survived Auschwitz thanks to her looks, for which she was called