Studia Filologiczne UJK

Summary

The article contains a critical analysis and evaluation of book entitled Izbica, Izbica the author of which is Rafał Hetman, a journalist and a reporter, whose publications were published in the papers “Gazeta Wyborcza”, “Tygodnik Powszechny” or in the magazine “Chidusz”. The reviewed book in form of an interview and a report from it shows the lot of the Jewish community in Izbica – a small place near Lublin in south-eastern Poland. During the Second World War it served as a concentration camp and a ghetto. Unfortunately the name of the place is only seldom mentioned in such context in the specialist literature about the holocaust and the martyrdom of the Jewish people in Poland. The book as a result of the reporter’s work can be regarded as a testimony and a history textbook of the local communities, in which the main characters lose their anonymity and become specific people with their own names and wealth of experience, living in the social constellations and traditional relationship with other people.