Communist Poland

Holli Levitsky; Justyna Wlodarczyk; Sara Nomberg-Przytyk

doi:10.5771/9781498577519

Summary

Communist Poland: A Jewish Woman’s Experience is the first-person account by Jewish journalist Sara Nomberg-Przytyk of surviving Auschwitz then rising to various leadership roles in the newly-formed postwar Polish Communist Party. Building a just and equitable Poland for the common Pole through communism was her dream. The reality was neither simple nor successful. Working for heavily censored newspapers and periodicals, Nomberg-Przytyk witnessed firsthand the inner workings of a communist government plagued by the same Kafkaesque bureaucracy and antisemitism that she had been certain it would fix. Her memoir provides a comprehensive account as she slowly changed from enthusiastic practitioner to witness of a system that failed her and many others. This is the first published edition of this text, originally recorded as oral testimony in Polish but translated into English by Paula Parsky, and includes a critical introduction by the co-editors, American and Polish academics Holli Levitsky and Justyna Włodarczyk, as well as extensive annotations.

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Bibliographic data

Copyright year: 2022
ISBN-Print: 978-1-4985-7750-2
ISBN-Online: 978-1-4985-7751-9
Publisher: Lexington, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 244
Product type: Edited Book

1. Contents No access
2. Acknowledgments No access
Introduction No access Pages 1 - 12
My First Day in the New Poland No access Pages 13 - 18
A Piece of White Bread No access Pages 19 - 24
An Armed Soldier at the Door of the Party Committee of Lublin No access Pages 25 - 28
A Parade of People and Portraits No access Pages 29 - 32
My First Victory No access Pages 33 - 36
I Meet My Destined One No access Pages 37 - 40
Small Candles Among the Ruins No access Pages 41 - 46
Old Friends in the New Poland No access Pages 47 - 52
The Kielce Pogrom No access Pages 53 - 56
You Don’t Know Me No access Pages 57 - 62
A New Job No access Pages 63 - 66
Why We Needed a 99 Percent Majority in the Elections No access Pages 67 - 70
Tell Me—Is It Possible? No access Pages 71 - 76
The Miracle in Lublin No access Pages 77 - 82
The Ruins of the War Will Disappear; In Their Places New Houses Will Stand No access Pages 83 - 88
You Are Going to Die No access Pages 89 - 92
I Want to, but My Wife Doesn’t No access Pages 93 - 96
The Light in the Shadows of the New Times No access Pages 97 - 102
Threat of Provocation Looming Over My Head No access Pages 103 - 106
The Death of a Dictator No access Pages 107 - 110
Nothing Has Changed—“The Jews Are Guilty” No access Pages 111 - 114
Opportunism Wins Out No access Pages 115 - 120
At the New Job No access Pages 121 - 126
In the Chains of Bureaucracy No access Pages 127 - 136
New Schools and Water in Peasant Houses—Optimistic Accents in the 1960s No access Pages 137 - 142
Is This the Role of a Journalist in Poland? No access Pages 143 - 150
My First Book No access Pages 151 - 154
The Pillars of Samson No access Pages 155 - 158
Jews in Auschwitz No access Pages 159 - 164
The Six-Day War No access Pages 165 - 172
Feelings of Terror and Insecurity Return No access Pages 173 - 178
The Polish Spring of 1968 No access Pages 179 - 186
A Beilis-Like Trial Against My Husband No access Pages 187 - 194
We Can No Longer Eat Bread Full of Worms No access Pages 195 - 202
As Though After a Pogrom No access Pages 203 - 208
The Last Stage of Our Exodus No access Pages 209 - 216
On the Road No access Pages 217 - 224
The Day of Escape for Jews in Poland No access Pages 225 - 230
Epilogue No access Pages 231 - 234
Index No access Pages 235 - 242
About the Editors No access Pages 243 - 244