The subject of the paper is Seweryna Szmaglewska's book 'Smoke over Birkenau', one of the most significant (as a fact-collecting, intellectual, and artistic) achievement in the domain of Nazi concentration camp literature. The author analyses the book's origin and reception, the documentary value and functions (attesting, accusing, cognitive, etc.) connected with it, and first and foremost its literary and world view dimension. The text shows Szmaglewska's struggle with the form to compose a text expressing the concentration camp reality in possibly most objective way, and the achieved ideological and artistic effects.
The text concerns the most notable, next to Passage through the Red Sea, literary accomplishment of Zofia Romanowiczowa – the 1956 novel Baśka i Barbara. It was the first emigration book to appear on Polish bookselling market, and its two 1958 Polish editions launched a vivid discussion among literary critics, columnists, educationalists, and, the so called, regular readers. It received all due attention for being, first of all, an exquisite and innovative literary text on motherhood. Moreover, however, the book now provides a moving commentary on such current issues as upbringing and education of emigrant children, their identity, bilingualism, and multiculturalism.
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