Holy Week — (2006)

A Novel of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

By Jerzy Andrzejewski

Foreword by Jan Gross
Introduction and commentary by Oscar E. Swan

“Creates in one slim volume a vivid world peopled by believable and sympathetic characters whose lives depict with gripping accuracy an entire historical era.... Urgently recommended to all readers with an interest in world history.”

Library Journal, starred review

“A tight, dramatic novel.... If its immediacy proved off-putting to contemporary readers, today that urgency is its greatest strength.”

Nextbook

“Andrzejewski here turns an unsparing eye on the ways in which professed Christians dealt with—or failed to address—the annihilation of their Jewish compatriots.... The world Andrzejewski conjures here may be relentlessly grim, but his tale is, as always, compelling.”

BookForum, Dec/Jan 2007

Show all quotes Show fewer quotes

At the height of the Nazi extermination campaign in the Warsaw Ghetto, a young Jewish woman, Irena, seeks the protection of her former lover, a young architect, Jan Malecki. By taking her in, he puts his own life and the safety of his family at risk. Over a four-day period, Tuesday through Friday of Holy Week 1943, as Irena becomes increasingly traumatized by her situation, Malecki questions his decision to shelter Irena in the apartment where Malecki, his pregnant wife, and his younger brother reside. Added to his dilemma is the broader context of Poles’ attitudes toward the “Jewish question” and the plight of the Jews locked in the ghetto during the final moments of its existence.

Few fictional works dealing with the war have been written so close in time to the events that inspired them. No other Polish novel treats the range of Polish attitudes toward the Jews with such unflinching honesty.

Jerzy Andrzejewski's Holy Week (Wielki Tydzien, 1945), one of the significant literary works to be published immediately following the Second World War, now appears in English for the first time.