“An Eroded Hebrew Inscription”

Abstract This article argues for an outstanding position for Jadwiga Maurer's prose in the canon of Holocaust testimony and—for reasons of its thematic and narratorial originality—in twentieth-century Polish literature. It focuses on Maurer's complex approach to the subject of the survivors’ identity: forcefully concealed, altered, and gradually, painfully recovered. It demonstrates how the experience of disruption and displacement (for several years after the war Maurer lived as a displaced person in Germany) affects the narrator's tangled perception of reality and her, and all survivors’, sense of existing outside of an historic time frame. It furthermore examines the seemingly paradoxical treatment of the victim's memory, the impulse to erase it or to keep it intact, that reverberates throughout all of Maurer's stories, including those that do not directly describe the horrors of the Shoah but meditate on their terminal impact on the consciousness of the saved, to use Maurer's preferred word.