Medallions by Zofia Nalkowska | Book Review

Medallions by the Polish novelist and essayist Zofia Nałkowska (1884–1954)

Medallions is considered a masterpiece of world Holocaust literature, deeply influenced by Nałkowska’s experience as a member of the Commission for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes, which was established in 1945. During that time, she visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Treblinka, and many other sites of mass killing and extermination. She conducted numerous interviews and listened to survivors’ and eyewitnesses’ testimonies, recorded just a few months after the end of the war in 1945. Nałkowska was profoundly affected by her work as a member of the Commission.

Medallions consists of eight short reportages in which survivors and eyewitnesses speak for themselves. There is no mythologisation of the victims: they are neither heroes nor martyrs. In her writing, Nałkowska managed to preserve the deeply personal character of individual experiences. Her style is concise, somewhat laconic, and almost economical. The most striking aspect of her reportages is her description of silences, where words are simply too weak to relate the experiences of the protagonists. She records the survivors’ intonations, gestures, postures, and emotions of shame, fear, and shock as they struggle to relate the atrocities they witnessed. Nałkowska is aware that much of their experience is left unspoken because there are no words to describe it.

Medallions is not merely a record of one of the darkest chapters in human history; it is also an incomparable portrayal of human suffering, unlike anything else I have read before.

Using the form of reportage to portray the machinery of the Holocaust, Medallions represents one of the first attempts to give a voice to the victims of genocide and to speak against atrocities from their point of view. Medallions also constitutes an act of bearing witness and of refusing to remain silent in the face of atrocities.

Medallions starts with an epigraph:

“People dealt this fate to people.”

This phrase became very common in the Polish language and serves as a reminder not to forget that the perpetrators of the atrocities were also people. There is a connection here to the concept of ‘the banality of evil’, which was introduced by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem, written almost two decades later, in 1963.

For Nałkowska, writing meant bearing witness to human suffering. She wrote in her wartime diaries, dated 1943:

“The only reason I’ve ever had to write has been the desire to preserve life, to keep it from being lost or destroyed. (…) The thought of passing without a trace fills me with fear.”

I will offer a few words about Zofia Nałkowska to better understand the importance of Medallions within the canon of world Holocaust literature.

Zofia Nałkowska was one of the most important Polish and European writers of the early 20th century: liberal, progressive, and a voice of social authority. She was the only woman in the Polish Academy of Literature during the 1930s. In her diaries, she recalled the significance of literature in her life:

“Ever since I was a child, I’ve been surrounded by books. (…) I thought it was like this everywhere, that the world of thoughts and ideas constituted the only reality. Later, I was shocked to learn that it was otherwise.”

Nałkowska was born at a time when Poland did not exist as an independent country. She experienced the First World War and Poland regaining independence in 1918, when she became an important member of the Polish PEN Club, followed by her becoming the first female member of the Polish Academy of Literature in 1933. For lovers of Bruno Schulz’s prose, it is important to bear in mind that Nałkowska was the person who encouraged Bruno to publish his writings and was largely responsible for bringing him to the attention of Polish literary circles in the 1930s.

Nałkowska lived through the Second World War in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. She was an eyewitness to the atrocities committed against the Jewish and Polish populations by the Nazis. Following the end of the war, Nałkowska lived in Poland, where an authoritarian communist regime was imposed by foreign powers, following the 1945 Yalta Conference. She passed away in 1954.

Those experiences and the constantly changing reality around her affected Nałkowska’s worldview tremendously.

One of the reportages, “By the Railway Track”, tells the story of an older Jewish woman who managed to escape from a train heading for Auschwitz. In doing so, she witnessed her husband being shot and herself becoming injured. The description of the empty, desolate, solitary landscape reflects the feelings of the dying woman. In the end, she asks one of the villagers to shoot her dead. There is no romanticising, no big words, no euphemism, no ‘music’ in the background.

“The emptiness was the whole of the world she saw.”

The testimony is provided by one of the eyewitnesses. It is important to understand the historical context of this story. Poland was the only country under Nazi occupation where helping Jewish people carried a mandatory death penalty, not only for the person or people who helped them, but also for their entire families. In some cases, whole villages could be sentenced either to death or sent to an extermination camp. This is important in order to understand the behaviour and attitudes of some of the villagers.

Other reportages, “The Hole” and “The Visa”, portray the bestiality of human beings, when one is reduced to a number, to a completely dehumanised form of being. There are descriptions of cannibalism.

The dehumanisation of the Other is also portrayed in “Professor Spanner”, where a young man describes the production of soap from human fat, which took place in the Anatomy Institute run by German scientists. It also shows how ideology took over German professors, doctors, members of the Medical Academy, and how, even after the war, some of them justified it as ‘merely following orders’ and doing it for the sake of the country.

This was the most difficult reportage for me to read. In current times, at least in the West, we often associate ‘formal education’ and ‘social status’ with decency and wisdom. But history has taught us numerous times that this is not the case. As portrayed in “Professor Spanner”, sheer human decency, emotional intelligence, empathy, and wisdom are not defined by social status or level of education. This reportage depicts a separation between ‘thought’ and ‘practice’ — ‘blindly following the mechanism of authority’. “Professor Spanner” also refers to the previously mentioned notion of ‘the banality of evil’, introduced years later by Hannah Arendt.

“Professor Spanner” can also be treated as a reflection of modern society: efficient, focused on science, rules, and authority. It shows how a lack of empathy and simple human emotions can turn a seemingly liberal and developed society into a facilitator and perpetrator of genocide on an unimaginable scale.

“The Hole” describes the fate of an older woman who lost her husband and is looking for her adult children, who almost certainly perished during the Holocaust. She survived but was completely alone in the world. After the war, survivors were often discouraged from talking about their experiences. This is also reflected in “The Cemetery Lady”, where the protagonist says:

“Reality is bearable when something prevents us from knowing it completely.”

If you are interested in the subject of silence following the Holocaust, I would highly recommend reading “The Lost Shore” by the Polish-French author Anna Langfus and At the Mind’s Limits by Jean Améry.

“The Man Is Strong” is another example of the dehumanisation of the Other. One of the men who was forced by the Nazis to bury the corpses of murdered people recognises the bodies of his wife and children. He asks the Nazis to kill him, but they refuse because they see him as some form of being who is still strong enough to work.

Medallions offers multi-layered reportages of eyewitnesses and survivors that will challenge readers’ emotions, their understanding of humanity, and their understanding of the responsibility to bear witness and speak up against the abuse and mistreatment of the Other before it turns into atrocity and genocide.

Nałkowska managed to express the reality of her times like no other. It is important to note that there is no commentary in the book. Before you decide to read Medallions, please ensure that you read a good history book to understand those times. A good starting point is The Holocaust by Laurence Rees and Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning.

I would highly encourage you to get a copy of Medallions – it is only fifty pages long and should be read and understood by everyone.