Józef Hen i Józef Bau

Abstract

The main subject of this article is Józef Hen’s 1955 short story Samotność (Loneliness). The prototype of its protagonist is Józef Bau, and the prototype of its main theme, the volume of poetry containing the poems “born from the nightmare of the death camp”, is his 1949 volume Cień przechodnia (The passer-by’s shadow), a work interesting both in terms of literature and art (graphics). Samotność is probably the only (and at the same time peculiar) expression of the reception of the volume Cień przechodnia. Hen and Bau met in 1945. The familiarity between the two writers, with Jewish roots, seems to result from a shared experience, the Jewish fate. In the case of Bau, who passed through the ghetto and concentration camps, this fate turned out to be traumatizing, as both his parents and his brother were murdered by the Germans. Nonetheless, the experiences of Hen, who fled to the East (the Soviet Union) in September 1939 and thus avoided similar torments, were painful too. Bau was the first person to report to Hen in detail what a concentration camp was. It seems that Samotność is, above all, a self-referential work, exploring the issue that has been and is still preoccupied with Hen as a writer and as a man who lost a number of his relatives during the war. By writing Samotność, as well as other works dealing the Holocaust and the loneliness of the survivors, Hen frees himself from his own trauma, and also calls for the memory of the “Jewish tragedies” (which were displaced during the period of Stalinism and the domination of socialist realism).