Ananke, or Destiny

Maciej Zaremba Bielawski’s book is an intricately woven tale of family history, focusing on his mother’s story and intertwining it with that of his father and their ancestors.  His mother, a miracle survivor of the Holocaust, sought psychiatric help for her brother shortly after the war. The psychiatrist, a descendant of the victors of Grunwald and founder of a sanatorium for the mentally ill in Kościan, became her husband. They are united by their future, but ultimately separated by a past that they have carefully pushed into oblivion, which bursts into the life of the whole family with a force incomprehensible to the author, who was a teenager at the time. In 1968, Marcin Zaremba Bielawski learns from his mother that he is of Jewish descent and that he must leave Poland. Now an adult with a wealth of experience in Poland and Sweden, after the death of his parents, he returns to their and his own experiences. He traces the course of his own fate, visits archives, studies materials about prisoners in German POW camps, and draws on his mother’s memoirs from 1939-1969, entitled Diable ściernisko (Devil’s Stubble). He compares in detail the two polar opposite experiences of his parents and his own, being unconscious in their shadow, which he calls in the book ‘growing up in the eye of the storm’. Bielawski gives an absolute insight into the world of his experiences; his subjective story is full of emotions, uncomfortable facts, poignant descriptions of cruelty and touching moments of humanity. It is impossible to tear oneself away from this insightful and precisely woven tale of intertwined Jewish and Polish fates, which reflects  a universal image of human destiny.

Beata Ciacek( translated with DeepL.com )