The book Rewanż, published in 2013, is a collection of memories in which Marceli Najder (born in 1914 in Bolechów (today Bolekhiv, Ukraine)) relates mainly the time of the occupation which the author spent in Kołomyja (today Kolomyia, Ukraine). The story begins when the Soviet troops leave the city (29–30 June 1941), to be replaced only a week later by the Hungarian, and later the German army. Marceli Najder, together with his wife Pola, was quartered in the Jewish ghetto in Kołomyja from the moment it was established. With the commencement of the liquidation of the ghetto, which was tantamount to the deportation of its inhabitants it to concentration camps, the spouses secretly moved to a dugout on Andrzej Śliwiak's farm. Together with eight other people, Pola and Marceli Najder hid for over a year (from the winter of 1942/1943 to the spring of 1944) in a small space, which they both refer to as a 'bunker' in their memories. This room functioned formerly as a cellar for storing barrels of beer. Even before the enclosure in the dugout, its future users and the host tried to adapt the room to live in as much as possible and made efforts to camouflage the entrance to the hideout. Discovering the bunker by the Germans would mean death not only for the hiding Jews, but also for the farmers who were helping them. In 1984, thanks to the efforts of Pola and Marceli Najder, Andrzej Śliwiak was awarded the title and distinction of the Righteous Among the Nations (https://sprawiedliwi.org.pl/en/about-the-righteous) by the Yad Vashem Institute for the Remembrance of Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes in Jerusalem.
Rewanż was issued 70 years after the events described in it. The book is based on of a manuscript consisting of seven notebooks completed by Marceli Najder during his stay in the bunker in Kołomyja. The author's memories were supplemented with notes from the 1940s and 1950s (after the resettlement to post-war Poland) and selected notes from the diary kept by his wife Pola. Marceli and Pola Najders' notes underwent only a minor linguistic edition, which allowed to keep the realism of the authors' experiences and to convey the full testimony of the described events to the reader.
Marta Frączkiewicz
