Sandauer w getcie. Rozliczenia literackie i nieliterackie
Sandauer in the Ghetto. Literary and non-literary account-settling

Summary/Abstract: In Sandauer’s private archive there is a text written in Italian, that is a testimony about his life in the Sambor ghetto and his involvment in the works of the local Judenrat, a confession that has never been made by the writer in any of his texts written in Polish. By comparing it to a literary testimony from the period – novels published in a volume “The Liberal’s Death” (Śmierć liberała) I try to show how the German bureaucratic machine forced people to adjust to a new “morality” and how they became objects in its motion. The historical context is reconstructed thanks to publications such as Isaiah Trunk’s “Judenrat” and Raul Hilberg’s “The Destruction of the European Jews”. Zygmunt Bauman’s thought conveyed in his book “Modernity and the Holocaust” deepens the context of this analysis. I also argue that Sandauer’s novels were not widely received or popular, because they represented a strictly Jewish point of view, quite unique to Polish literature of the period, and quite unwellcomed.

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