THE WHOLE STORY TAKES PLACE IN POLAND TOWARD THE end of World War II. The most familiar shred of history is viewed from an unfamiliar angle: from a large psychiatric hospital in Warsaw called Tworki. In order to be original at all costs? Not at all: in those dark times it was the most natural thing to seek out some corner to escape to. On the one hand horror, on the other, refuge.
The hospital is run by the Germans (not by Nazi monsters; don’t go looking for clichés in this book); they employ a few very young Poles as bookkeepers, among them three or four Jews with false identity papers. What is instantly striking: these young people bear no resemblance to the youth of our days; they are modest, shy, awkward, with a naive thirst for morality and for goodness; they live their “virginal loves,” whose jealousies and disappointments never turn into hatred, in that strange atmosphere of obstinate gentleness.
Is it because of the half century between them that the youngsters back then differ so from those of our time? I see another reason for that dissimilarity: the idyll they were living was the daughter of horror—of horror hidden but ever present, always ready to pounce. This is the Luciferian paradox: if a society (ours, for instance) unleashes gratuitous violence and wickedness, it’s because it has no real experience of evil, of evil’s rule. For the crueler history is, the lovelier the world of refuge appears; the more ordinary a situation, the more it feels like a buoy for “escapees” to cling to.
There are pages in this novel where words recur as refrains, and where the narration becomes a song that lifts us up and away. Where does that music, that poetry, spring from? From the prose of life; from the most ordinary, the most banal of banalities: Jurek is in love with Sonia: his nights of love are mentioned only very briefly, but the movement of the swing Sonia sits upon is described in detail. “Why are you so fond of the swing?” Jurek asks. “Because … It’s hard to say. I’m here, and then suddenly I’m there, higher up. And here again. And there again.” Jurek hears that disarming confession and, marveling, he looks up high, to where “the light brown soles of her shoes became dark…. Coming down, … her brown soles passed under Jurek’s nose….” He looks on, still marveling, and he will never forget.
Near the end of the book Sonia will go off. In the past she had escaped here to Tworki, to live out, in terror, her fragile idyll. She is a Jew; no one knows this (not even the reader). However, she goes to the German director of the hospital and tells him, thus incriminating herself. The director cries, “You’re mad! You’re mad!” and tries to put her into isolation to save her. But she persists. When we next see her she is no longer alive: “There, high above the juniper brushes on a thick bough on a thin poplar, high above the ground, Sonia hung, Sonia swung, Sonia was hanged.”
On the one hand, the idyll of ordinary life, the idyll recovered, given new value, transformed into song; on the other, the hanged girl.