Volume 23, Number 9 · May 27, 1976
Graves Everywhere
By Neal Ascherson
A Dreambook for Our Time
by Tadeusz Konwicki, translated by David Walsh, with an introduction by Leszek Kolakowski
Penguin, 282 pp., $2.95 (paper)
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
by Tadeusz Borowski, selected and translated by Barbara Vedder, with an introduction by Jan Kott
Penguin, 180 pp., $2.95 (paper)
'You see what our earth is like. No matter where you tread, there are graves everywhere.' A character in Dreambook for Our Time is speaking, in the remote forested valley where the main action of this novel is set. It has many graves: mounds covering the bones of insurrectionaries from the Polish rising of 1863, the dead partisans of the Home Army which fought against the German occupation in the last war, the unknown Russian prisoners slaughtered as they tried to escape from the Nazis. A wanderer in the woods stumbles into ancient bunkers, hiding places for armed bands who fought the Germans or, in the civil war which ensued in the forests, fought the communist militia of their own people.
Review, 2588 words
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