Description
Book SynopsisAs a contribution to accounts of wartime experiences, Jadwiga Lenartowicz Rylko's story stands out for its sensitivity to the complexities of the Polish memory of war. Built upon both historical research and conversations between mother and daughter, the story combines Jadzia's voice and Rylko-Bauer's own journey of rediscovering her family's past.
Trade ReviewCompelling. Riveting. Exquisite. Barbara Rylko-Bauer brings an anthropologist's mind, eye, heart, and ear to the untold story of a young Polish physician ensnared as subject and accessory to the Nazi project of slave labor and mass murder. In no uncertain terms,
A Polish Doctor in the Nazi Camps reaffirms the dignity of survival, resilience, and solidarity in the face of human suffering. The book sets a high bar for the new genre of intimate ethnography."" - Gelya Frank, author of
Venus on Wheels: Two Decades of Dialogue on Disability, Biography, and Being Female in America""Barbara Rylko-Bauer is a patient and painstaking documentarian and a superb writer with a knack for revealing how forces and events beyond the control or the ready understanding of her protagonists came to affect even their most intimate thoughts and daily lives, and to shape their recollections. Through a mother and daughter's incandescent collaboration, the rough stone of memory is tumbled and polished, emerging as a fiery gem."" - Paul Farmer, author of
Haiti after the Earthquake and
To Repair the World: Paul Farmer Speaks to the Next Generation""A necessary and important book about a time period already well described but not from this point of view. Rylko-Bauer adds a poignant and often moving annex to Holocaust literature without centering her narrative on that cataclysm. Her mother's story, while only a sliver of it, encompasses enough horror to give meaning to the much more pervasive devastation of the Jewish community."" - Gretchen Schafft, author of
From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich
