Dziecko Holocaustu jako bohater-narrator w Królestwie Szczepana Twardocha

Abstract

One of the narrators in Szczepan Twardoch’s novel Królestwo [Kingdom] is a Jewish child, David Shapiro. In the first-person narration, David relates his experience of Warsaw as a collapsing Polish-Jewish kingdom of his father Jakub, a boxer and gangster. First, he portrays his peaceful childhood before 1939. After the outbreak of WWII, he tells the story of his family being evicted from their house by the German Nazis, of the ghetto and its everyday life, of the arrest during the Great Action in August 1942, the transport in cattle wagons to the extermination camp in Treblinka, and his escape from the speeding train. Through the narrative, the reader observes the process of accelerated maturation of the narrator during the Holocaust, along with his inner destruction. The boy belongs to the category of victims called the children of the Holocaust. The article discusses subsequent stages of the boy’s degradation: from his isolation in the ghetto, his depersonalization, his accelerated maturation caused by external factors (terror, poverty, and hunger), the process of becoming an old man as a child, to his rebirth in exile in Israel.