Objects

One of the unpublished illustrations for the book "Ręka umarłej" (Hand of a Deceased), specifically for Maria Zarębińska-Broniewska's short story "Gołębie" (Pigeons). It depicts a house among the greenery of the narrator's childhood memories and the pigeons that were first given to her and later killed by the peasant Jędrzej when the girl's family did not accept the gift.

The story takes the form of a camp letter to her husband with a recollection of this dark episode from her childhood. It begins with the words: "My Dear! I am writing you a letter that will, undoubtedly, never find its way to you. Actually, writing into the abyss feels utterly futile, and yet, I feel compelled.

I lie there, stare for hours at the patch of green grass, at the ever-new legs of people going to their deaths – and I feel just as helpless as I did at four years old" (p. 29).

This story was not intended to open the cycle in the author's original, unrealised (unfinished) prose intention, nor did it open the posthumously published "Opowiadania oświęcimskie" (Auschwitz Stories) (1948). In the volume "Ręka umarłej" (Hand of a Deceased), which has a completely different layout from the earlier editions of "Opowiadania", it is "Gołębie" that opens the section with Zarębińska-Broniewska's works (this section follows the introduction and two poems by Władysław Broniewski). Such a shift in the text – as Maciej Tramer notes in his work analysing editions of Zarębińska-Broniewska's camp works – gives "Ręka umarłej" a 'peculiarly elegiac character', whereas the author's intention was for the short stories to be first and foremost a picture-testimony of Auschwitz. See https://dspace.uni.lodz.pl/handle/11089/24986.

Ultimately, the full-page illustration used in the book (on page 21, the story begins on the next page) is related to the rejected composition, although, firstly, the published one is in colour, and secondly, only trees and the road are visible at the bottom. The set of works in the museum's collection does not include the board that was eventually used in the book.

The sun and cloud motifs, present in the illustration (as well as in its rejected version and the one finally printed), also appear on the wrapper. They can be considered to underline the role that the short story "Gołębie" plays in the composition of the volume.

Przemysław Kaniecki