Krystyna Żywulska, parade gojka. Odwóch językach polskiej kultury po Zagładzie
Krystyna Żywulska, a Parade Goy: On the Two Languages of Polish Culture After the Shoah

Summary/Abstract: Szczepan reads Krystyna Żywulska’s memoir Przeżyłam Oświęcim [I Survived Auschwitz] as a Marrano testimony of the Shoah, and also as a record of the “two languages” (G.Niziołek) of postwar Polish culture – that of the victim and that of the witness of the Shoah. Żywulska’s memoir (1946), written from the point of view of a member of the Catholic Polish intelligentsia, is juxtaposed with her second book Pustą wodą [Empty Water, 1963], where she describes her experiences as a Jew in the Warsaw Ghetto. Szczepan examines the strategy of camouflage and mimicry that serves Żywulska to construct a non-Jewish biography in her memoir; she also explores the connections between the Jewish and non-Jewish lives that Żywulska creates to describe a counterfactual history of her own life.

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