A Mole or a Whale? Which Way Is It to Rechnitz? Sacha Batthyany: A co ja mam z tym wspólnego? Zbrodnia popełniona w marcu 1945 roku. Dzieje mojej rodziny. Trans. Emilia Bielicka. Warszawa, Czytelnik, 2017, 256 pp.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31261/NoZ.2018.04.23Keywords:
Sacha Batthyany, philosophy of memory of the Shoah, RechnitzAbstract
The review of Sacha Batthyany’s A co ja mam z tym wspólnego? Zbrodnia popełniona w marcu 1945 roku. Dzieje mojej rodziny focuses on several key issues related to the philosophy of memory of the Shoah. Two animal metaphors are central to the text: that of a whale and that of a mole, which symbolise different approaches towards the familial history revealed before the Swiss writer. “Whale persons” vanish in darkness of the deep once the time of confrontation with the difficult truth about the past comes; “mole persons,” in turn, are devoted to massive archival work and to an analysis of meticulously reconstructed facts. Batthyany chooses to speak of the massacre in Rechnitz from the authorial perspective; he reaches the documents and the diary, simultaneously altering the story in a manneristic way by means of referring to his own experiences, often dominant in the narration. Even though it is one of the basic rights of artistic practice, subjectivism in discussing and accepting truth can become deceptive as it can lead to relativisation of history and oversimplified assertions.
References
Janko A.: Mała Zagłada. Kraków 2015; M. Sznajderman: Fałszerze pieprzu. Historia rodzinna. Wołowiec 2016.
Frankel A.: Dziewczynka. Przeł. L. Kwiatkowski. Warszawa 2007.
Pollack M.: Śmierć w bunkrze. Opowieść o moim ojcu. Przeł. A. Kopacki. Wołowiec 2006.
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