Lest We Forget

by Adolf Rudnicki

A book on the holocaust. Published in Poland.

170 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1955

About the author

Adolf Rudnicki (1909–1990) was born as Aron Hirschhorn (also Hirszhorn) in Żabno near Tarnów. Many sources list a false date (1912) and place of birth, probably due to Rudnicki’s own efforts to “[blur] the traces of biographical identification” (Wróbel, 2004, p. 18). In 1928 he joined the army, and in the 1930s he moved to Warsaw, where he joined bohemian circles. During the interwar period he published in numerous literary periodicals and made his literary debut in 1930 with the short story The Death of the Operator (Śmierć operatora), which he published under the pseudonym Rudnicki. Two years later, he published his first novel, Rats (Szczury). In 1939, he took part in the September campaign (the defensive war against the German invasion of Poland) and was taken prisoner, but managed to escape to Lviv, where he stayed until 1942. After leaving Lviv, he lived in Warsaw on the Aryan side of the city. As Piotr Kuncewicz recalls, Rudnicki spent a short time, by his own choice, in the ghetto (Finezje literackie, 1997, part I), where he was involved in a conspiracy and took part in the Warsaw Uprising. In 1944 he moved to Lublin, and later to Lodz, which was an important centre for literary and artistic life after the war.

Suspended between Polish and Jewish identities, Rudnicki tries to find a literary form for describing the mass extermination, led by his belief in the important role and value of art, as well as in the heroism and dignity of the human being. His stories present “an optimistic testimony, as one can find there an assumption about indestructible human ability to resist evil and save elementary values even under pressure of the greatest fear and against the powerful forces of history”. Rudnicki’s postwar literary works performed the extremely important function of “solidary memory”, The works from this stage in Rudnicki’s literary activity (especially The Escape from Yasnaya Polyana / Ucieczka z Jasnej Polany) often overshadow those of his prewar work. He is persistently classified as “the writer of the Holocaust” alongside such names as Zofia Nałkowska (→ Medallions), Tadeusz Borowski (→ A Farewell to Maria), and Ladislav Fuks (→ Mr Theodore Mundstock).