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The Black Seasons is a 1999 autobiography by the Polish writer, Michal Glowinski which chronicles his memories from his childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto and years growing up in hiding.

The Black Seasons

Author	Michal Glowinski
Original title	Czarne sezony
Translator	Marci Shore
Genre	Autobiography Holocaust
Publisher	Northwestern University Press
Publication date	2005
Publication place	Poland
Pages	192
ISBN	9780810119598
Preceded by	The Underworld Presented: Sketches on the Poetry of Bolesław Leśmian (1998)
Followed by	The Ending (1999)

Synopsis

Glowinski revisits episodes of his childhood such as an emaciated violinist playing a Mendelssohn concerto on the ghetto streets; his game of chess with a Polish blackmailer threatening to deliver him to the Gestapo; and his eventual rescue by Catholic nuns in an impoverished, distant convent.

Each piece focuses on an episode or person that has imprinted itself on Glowinski's memory.

It is also an account of his gradually overcoming anti-German prejudices. The book as a whole is also a discreet literary tribute to his parents' love. The Black Seasons also poses the question of the exemplarity of such testimonial writing.

Detailed review

Michal Glowifiski, a distinguished literary critic and professor at the Institute of Literary Studies of the Polish Academy of Science, was not yet five years old on September 1, 1939, when Germany attacked Poland and, hand in hand with its Soviet ally launched the genocidal programs. That, by the war's end, had eliminated almost 20% of the Polish population. Following Hermann Goering's orders of "the complete solution of the Jewish question," issued on July 31, 1941, over three hundred thousand Polish Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto were herded into Cattle wagons and transported to concentration camps, where they were killed in gas chambers. He quickly learned that the ghetto was not, as he had imagined, a fabulous carriage with many staircases and windows. That was pulled through the city by a big team of horses, but a formless space filled with discolored paper that covered the corpses lying in the street. He was haunted by the image of a tall, hunchbacked a who had hanged himself in the bathroom and by the suicide of his grandfather, who might have thought that "in the era of the Final Solution, the best solution for him was suicide." He witnessed execution of fellow Jews carried out in the courtyard and played a game of chess against a Polish blackmailer--"or rather, against Death'-who entered his family's hiding Place. He walked with his parents to the Umschlagplatz, an assembly point for deportation by Train to the Treblinka concentration camp. Glowifiski survived the war, thanks to the determination of his parents and relatives (especially. of his mother's cousin, the resourceful Dlugi), the help of a Jewish policeman who led Them out of the Umschlagplatz, and the protection of Polish friends and strangers. Prominent among his rescuers was Irena Sendlerowa, "the guardian angel of those in hiding." A leading member of Zegota, the Council for Aid to Jews, which was connected with the Polish Home Army, Sendlerowa saved over 2, 00 Jewish children (twice as many as Oscar Schindler). She placed him in the secluded Turkowice convent run by the Felician nuns, who in their turn saved over thirty Jewish children, even though one nun, Sister Longina, and a group of boys were Murdered in 1944. Glowifiski returned gradually to "that murdered world," first by telling his story to several. Friends, then writing it down and finally publishing it in 1998. During this lengthy process, he struggled to restore his suppressed and fragmented childhood memories. He had to let go of the self-protective attitudes of silence and invisibility that he learned during "the season of dying." That effort must have been particularly trying because "that feeling--as if a rope were being tightened around my neck--still lives in me." He had to re-experience the deep and paralyzing fear caused by a threat of denunciation issued by the three Warsaw brothers Z. in Turkowice and to embark on a painful reexamination of the frequent role of chance in determining life or death. Glowifiski's The Black Seasons, published in the series Jewish Lives, endeavors to show the Holocaust (in his words Zaglada or Jlyniszczenie) through the eyes of a child. It evokes the spirit of Imre Kert6sz's Fatelessness and the letter of two books published recently by the Northwestern University Press, Bogdan Wojdowski's Bread for the Departed (1997) and Last Eyewitnesses (1999), edited by Wiktoria ýliwowska, provides the testimonies of Jewish. children who survived the Holocaust in Poland and remained there after the war. Intrigued by the mechanisms of memory, Glowifiski traces the tangled course that led to the reconstruction of his experiences. He is aware of huge gaps in his recollections and does not try. to fill them to achieve a coherent narrative. He wants to tell his story in a form appropriate. to the theme of the Holocaust, which means in simple language free of pathos, emotions, and judgments. He records his "flashes of memory" in fragmentary fashion, his style plain. But he is not always able to separate what he remembered as a child from what he later heard or read, and resorts at times to sophisticated language laced with words like "psychomachia" and "palimpsest"; to painstaking phrases, e.g., "happiness transcended the repertoire of my behavior"; or too weighty sentences, e.g., "My time in Turkowice was homogenous and arrested, shaped on a certain model that seemed inviolable, if not eternal." Written with honesty and compassion, The Black Seasons delivers a powerful story full of reviews 173 bal and visual detail. Encouraged by the favorable reception of this book, Glowifiski has written. three more books, which are still awaiting translation into English: Magdalenka z razowego chleba (2001), Historiajednej topoli i inne opowie9ci (2003), and KIadka nad czasem: obrazki z miasteczka (2006). In these collections of stories, Glowifiski again leans over "the wells of memory." To draw out the shapes of people and places from his childhood and youth. Marci Shore's fluent and sensitive translation of The Black Seasons is marred only by occasional. slips, e.g., "That one" (8) instead of "Hey you," "the ending" (64) instead of "the endgame," "the Felicjanka nuns" (83, 8 ) instead of "the Felician nuns" or "Nuns of St. Felix," "destined for the firing squad" and "destined for the gallows" (118, 173) instead of "marked for a kill," and by several editorial oversights, e.g., the misspellings of "Legmian" and "Wolodyjowski" in the Notes. Michael J. Mikog, University of Wisconsin-MilwaukeeGlowinski is especially concerned with historical truth, and in the chapters of the book he presents accounts of authentic events. "Each of them," he writes, "is a record of real life experience, it comes from flashes of memory which do not include all events, do not encompass all my life in those times and history of my survival (...) I would be unable to produce a systematic account of events-the gaps in my memory are too large; filling them with speculation or invention, or even with information from other available sources would be highly improper and pointless." Another recent book, a memoir by Marcus Leuchter, has been called a "literature of bare facts rather than generalities about the Holocaust" (The Sarmatian Review 20: 3). Glowinski's narrative belongs to the same category. However, Czarne sezony is more than a story of survival or a historical account. It demonstrates Glowinski's wonderful feeling for language, as he penetrates the multiple meanings and connotations of words. Some of these key words and phrases-"ghetto," "exodus from the ghetto," "black seasons," "selection" (ie. selection for the gas chambers), "season of the grand dying"-are underlying motifs, and can serve as starting points for a critical analysis. Glowinski's grim depiction of the German occupation of Poland is hardly black-and-white; it's gray-like the paper used to wrap corpses in the Warsaw ghetto. This gray paper is a motif throughout the book and "grayness" is a feature of the ghetto (a feature captured extremely well, in Glowinski's opinion, in Andrzej Wajda's film Korczak). In this book, we find not only Jews who suffered under the occupation, but also Jews who collaborated with Germans and helped select other Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to be sent to Treblinka. In one scene, a woman describes a selection in which another Jew, a prewar acquaintance of hers, took part as a helper to the Germans. She declares without irony: "What a decent man," since he had asked the German officer to choose another woman and leave her alone during the selection. There are several examples of the attitudes Poles took during this time. Once, the author tells us, he was taken for a walk by his aunt to the "Aryan side." She left him in a coffee shop, and he found himself surrounded by a group of women who said: "A little Jew, surely he's a Jew." "We ought to tell the police." "I was aware," Glowinski writes, "that telling the police meant a death sentence." But he adds with a bitter benevolence: "These ladies were by no means consumed by an irresistible hatred [...] They found themselves in a situation that for them was difficult and dangerous, so they wanted to resolve it. But they did not think about the price [I would pay for it]." Even though many Poles saved Jews, some wheeler-dealers tracked Jews down and denounced them to the Germans. The chapter "Black Hour" is a story of a visit by such a wheelerdealer to the apartment where the author and his family were in hiding. Adult members of the family went in search of money to pay the ransom. The boy remained as a hostage and played chess with the unwelcome guest. "Black hour" is a modem realization of the old motif of a man playing chess with death. In this case death "assumed the form of a handsome young man with a cute moustache." The Seventh Seal Set in Sweden during the Black Death, it tells of the journey of a medieval knight (Max von Sydow) and a game of chess he plays with the personification of Death (Bengt Ekerot), who has come to take his life. Bergman developed the film from his own play Wood Painting. Directed by: Ingmar Bergman Actor: Max von Sydow Glowinski shows the range of inclinations present in the Catholic clergy. On the one hand, we meet the nuns from Turkowice to whom the author undoubtedly owes his survival. He devotes many pages to their exceptional courage and sacrifices. On the other hand, the chapter "I Killed Jesus Christ" features the terrifying figure of a priest who taught religion in a school in Pruszkow where the author lived after the war. During class the priest would announce to his pupils that all Jews were responsible for killing Jesus Christ. He admitted that "Hitler was awful because he persecuted the Polish nation," but claimed at the same time that he had "one merit: he took care of the Jewish question." After hearing this, the boy understood that his teacher had "crossed the limits and was simply praising the crime." Glowinski's memoir breaks an unspoken rule of "political correctness" in contemporary Poland, which suggests that one should speak about Germans only in a positive way. The chapter "And Germans Are Human, Too" exposes a trauma that is not willingly discussed these days. However, it is an important testimony to experiences that cannot be easily erased from survivors' minds. "I hear," Glowinski writes in this chapter, "that in recent years there has been a tendency to refer to those who invented and executed the `final solution' not as Germans, but as Nazis. In this way the whole nation is absolved of responsibility for the crime [... I When discussion turns to such issues, however, I'm reminded of that truism: societies do not know what they do not want to know." Czarne sezony may be a bitter pill to swallow for all those who would like to forget the tragedies of the past-Jews, Poles, and Germans alike. Due to the controversial issues it addresses, the book will probably not be popular among ideologists on any side. But it needs to be read-for its shocking testimony, its excellent prose, and for its courage.

As indicated both by Jan T. Gross' Foreword and by the translator's preface to the English version of the book, Głowiński's stories juxtapose two voices, that of his young child-self, describing elusive episodes imperfectly remembered, and that of his adult self, reflecting on the possible meaning of his past experiences from his mature perspective of later-acquired knowledge. In his own author's note, Głowiński indicates his attempt to merely offer his imperfect relation to experience ‘emerging from flashes of memory’27, while openly including the gaps he cannot fill and professing his lack of better knowledge. Unlike other literary works of child survivors which simply allude to their early personal experiences without really offering insight into certain feelings and memorial snapshots the child has carried over from Holocaust times (such as Norman Manea), Głowiński's stories fill that gap. They represent an accumulation of imagistic episodes he has lived with since Shoah times. His recollections therefore sanction and give shape to Manea's image of the young child-inmate and later survivor from the short story ‘Proust's Tea’ as that of an individual formed by identification with unpleasant memories and internalising incertitude, the possibility of anything becoming anything else.

Głowiński's most powerful story to that effect is the opening one, ‘Fragments from the Ghetto’, a story that juxtaposes the author's random snapshot memories of the ghetto during the four years he spent there. Głowiński starts by exemplifying the five-year-old child's initial confusion as to moral contours or normal life frames on entering the ghetto. While the adults obviously associate the need to move to ‘the ghetto’ with fear, for the young child the word brings to mind a sense of fairy-tale adventure and privilege: ‘I envisioned this mysterious and incomprehensible ghetto as a huge, many-storied carriage riding through the streets of the city, pulled by some umpteen horses. Into such a carriage they would put us, and we would live there; on the whole it would turn out to be something quite exciting and entertaining. […] I conjured up this fantastical carriage on the model of a hearse – the black carriage of death – such as could be seen from time to time in our city.’28 The way in which the boy conceives the ghetto, as a magic carriage constructed after the image of a hearse, reveals the way in which for the young child there is no clear meaning of life and death yet. As such, the passage suggests young children's complete lack of any protection during the Holocaust. Meanwhile, the same text ironically pinpoints a child's innocent but accurate grasp of what the ghetto was to become, not the innocent ‘childhood phantasmagoria’ about ‘fascinating adventures’, as he initially thought, but a place of ‘precise meaning’: that of infinitely multiplying deaths.29 It became a site of collective death, in which he remembers ‘the corpses belonged to the permanent landscape, as the street was a place of death’ on which he daily saw corpses lying on the pavement, covered with greyish paper while awaiting to be taken away.30 Given that, Głowiński uses his own experience to suggest to readers a child-inmate's complete precariousness in front of the chaos of the Holocaust, his identity being formed in and through such places and images of ever-present death. It is in light of this that Głowiński puts forth the complicated meanings a fairy tale takes for such a child, quite similarly to Manea. If the Romanian Jewish author shows how, after the war, a fairy tale offers the child survivor entry into reality as a site of permanent threat with which he perfectly identifies given his wartime experiences, Głowiński decries the emptying of a fairy tale's conventional meaning as a supernatural world of happiness during the Holocaust. Thus, pleasure and happiness as inherent characteristics of fairy tales are almost completely annihilated by the everyday reality in the ghetto perceived by a small child. Głowiński's ideas are sanctioned by the case of another child of similar age taken to the Transnistrian ghetto of Moghilev, one which Emil Dorian, a Romanian Jewish physician living in Bucharest during the Second World War, included in the diary he kept between 1937 and 1944. Dorian's diary includes three entries about Clara, an orphan girl just returned from Transnistria alongside other parentless children temporarily repatriated before being sent to Palestine. Her case significantly testifies the immediate effects left on young children whose identity was in full process of being formed during the Holocaust and the direst forms they took for children who had lost their parents, unlike the more fortunate situations of Manea and Głowiński who benefited from their family's presence in the ghetto. Born in Bucharest in 1941, at six years old Clara was taken to Czernowitz by her parents to visit her uncle; the whole family was deported to Moghilev, Transnistria, where her parents died.31 Dorian most clearly notes how on her return to Bucharest, Romania, in 1944, Clara no longer wants to listen to regular stories like the Yiddish ‘poem-fable’ he tries to tell, but only looks for ‘real stories’ like that of ‘my life in Moghilev’32 or ‘the bombing of Bucharest’.33 Put differently, young children traumatised by the Holocaust seem to reject happy-ending tales of imagination and ask instead for ‘real stories’ of trauma, like those they had been brought up with. Especially in the case of orphans, these unpleasant memories breed the direst penchant for unpleasant ‘real stories’, the only ones they deem true to life.

In similar terms, in ‘The Pastry’, another story about ghetto life recounting how his parents had promised him a pastry on recovering from illness which is stolen by another boy immediately after purchase, he further notes how Holocaust ghetto experience meant ‘the moment when what had already seemed most terrible was transformed into something still more terrible, something so extraordinarily evil that there are no more words with which to speak about’.40 Głowiński calls the traumatic memory depicted in this story ‘the first cruel lesson imparted to me so directly and so personally’.41 That happens in the context in which the boy becomes aware of his privileged position of having his parents at his side, meeting his ‘basic needs’, so that the pastry could still be for him just an object of a normal child's fantasy, ‘an unusual, inaccessible, magical world’ displayed in a shop window.42 Once bought, this ‘much-desired object’ causes the child's happiness and decision to eat it at home, in a peaceful environment, as ‘a reward for my good behaviour as a patient’.43 But the pastry is taken away by ‘a ragged kid – a living skeleton – devouring the pastry as if he wanted to swallow the paper with it’.44 On one hand, like Manea, Głowiński's recollections stress how the formative ingredient for their young generation meant replacing a taken-for-granted absolute degree of evil by a mere comparative of superiority, an ever-renewed possibility of things getting worse. Henceforth threat could at any time take other, more terrible forms, to which the boy reacts with ‘convulsive sobbing’, ‘howling and gnashing of teeth’. On the other hand, however, he also becomes aware of the importance of his parents' presence and care, unlike the case of the ragged street child for whom hunger has become the main quotidian issue to tackle. He writes: ‘Thanks to my parents, who protected me as much as they could, I had yet to experience the worst. I didn't yet know suffering in the form of hunger.’45 In light of these two discoveries, the boy notes how, after that episode, ‘my world collapsed’, and he realises that he can only expect thwarted desires and deprivation as a way of life: ‘I'd grasped that nothing would any longer happen as I wanted it to, that I was vulnerable to aggression, and that what I wanted for my own and what mattered to me would be taken away.’46

Throughout his five stories of ghetto life, Głowiński also identifies the lingering fear of imminent death as a primary ingredient of a young child's forming consciousness, starting with images of dead corpses and living skeletons on the streets, just like ‘an emaciated man, no longer young, playing the violin’ for money47 and getting to the case of his paternal grandfather who committed suicide as ‘the only available means of freedom’ for him under the circumstances, a form of ‘death by choice’.48 The child-narrator notes that despite the ever-present character of death in the ghetto, his consciousness of the meaning of death, that is, ‘a person was – and suddenly is no more’, has forever remained ‘yoked with terror’ and a ‘fear difficult to overcome’. 49

Given this, like the adults, children-inmates lived through a time in which pleasure of everyday life had become impossible, while the impossible unending unpleasant reality had not only become possible, but it was getting new, more terrible forms every day. Nevertheless, unlike adults who had their sense of self formed and still possessed some pleasurable memories from prior times as temporary escape, this young generation internalised life as just that: a case of radical contingencies and ever-more powerful threats

Themes

 # First, it is the perspective of a child.    

1. Second, skilful use of language.
2. Third, it deals with the consequences of growing up during the war. Although the memoirs are written down almost fifty years later, the perspective of the child is maintained. Most of these are flashbacks rather than memories. This is the incompleteness, together with the striking co-existence of reality of Warsaw's Jewish ghetto and fantastical products of the child's mind, that makes an ever-lasting impression. Glowinski’s goal is not to chronicle his survival in any continuous manner. Acknowledging great gaps in his memory, he proceeds in fragments, each of them being, he declares, “a relation of an experience, emerging from flashes of memory, neither embracing the entirety of events nor encompassing all of [his] life and the history of how [he] survived.” He concentrates only on what he remembers, adds “I don’t know” whenever he no longer remembers, and refuses to fill out his tale with “fiction, conjectures, and . . . information drawn from other sources.” This tale of how his book is composed—the tale of his memory in the Shoah's aftermath—is also part of the story. It is essentially “the same story,” as Cohen puts it, that all such Jewish children have to tell, but here, too, is a particularly compelling authenticity. Glowinski is a professional interpretor of literature, well aware of words and their functions. Story is told with use of elegant lexems, several vivid metaphors and striking sentences. Memoirs do not stop when the war ends, but we see the consequences. They take a form of a young boy with post-traumatic stress, who learns to live in post-war Poland, affected by anti-Jewish propaganda. Next, we see an adult man confronted with his fear and hater when encountering German citizens. He tells us from an entirely different perspective that if "literature" emerges in his account it must be "derivative, inadvertent, and unintentional," and insists that he writes an "authentic narrative" as devoid as possible of literature. Authenticity demands an account of the "contempt and revulsion" he feels toward Germans, but it occurs by his own description at a weak moment in which he is overpowered by feeling and loses self-control. Glowinski 's hardheaded admission that there are some things one cannot get over Glowinski too is committed to a strict policing of the porous boundary between aesthetic pleasure and thought, between memory and its potential subjugation by narrative pleasure, whimsy, or traumatic aftermaths. He would probably not deny that, in Todorov's formulation, Levi is more truthful and "too human" because his style escapes the pitfalls of the overly literary. But assertions that Levi manages to weigh matters judiciously in the aftermath of trauma ignore not only that he

Author

 Michał Głowiński was born in 1934 in Warsaw     He is a literary scholar in Poland and the author of literary criticism, history, and theory.   

Awards and distinctions

 Nominated for the Nike Literary Award in 1999.     

Reception

 One reviewer noted that the stories were not unrepresentative of other survivors' memories but did not show a generic Jewish life.        Głowiński  does not repeat what is common knowledge about the Holocaust.   

See also

• Existential anxiety
• Maslow's hierarchy of needs

References

The Black Seasons

Author / Creator

Michael J. Mikoś

Published

American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL of the U.S., Inc.)

The Slavic and East European Journal, 2007-04-01, Vol.51 (1), p.171-173

xCategory:Personal accounts of the Holocaust