ABSTRACT
Hanna Krall (b. 1935) was born in Warsaw but grew up in Lublin. As a Jewish child, she survived World War II in hiding. Much of her family perished in the Holocaust; its aftermath on the lives of displaced individuals and their sense of identity became the subject of most of her writing. After the war she completed journalism studies in Warsaw and worked for a variety of major newspapers and periodicals, first attracting widespread attention for her long interview with Marek Edelman, at the time the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Zdążyć przed Panem Bogiem (Getting There Before God, translated into English as Shielding the Flame, 1997). Most of her works are minimalistic non-judgmental retellings of people’s stories, rather in the tradition of Zofia Nauikowka’s 1945 vignettes on war crimes Medaliony (Medallions, i. e. funerary snapshots). By keeping only to the sparest of documented facts, Krall lets her readers raise the important unasked questions and fill in the missing narrative details for themselves. The story Ta z Hamburga (That Woman from Hamburg), was published in the collection Taniec na cudzym weselu (Dancing at Someone Else’s Wedding, Polska Oficyna Wydawnicza, 1993). It became the basis of Jan Jakob Kolski’s well-regarded 2000 film Daleko od okna (Stay Away from the Window). https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315883724/f1ec34ee-0050-45f0-bb21-227ec0c07bdd/content/ufig14_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
