All of Hanna Krall's Lives

Cover (detail) of Hanna Krall's book, "Lives of Maria". © Éditions Noir sur Blanc

Text by: Olivier Favier

"You will not bear false witness against your neighbor. In 1995, for his television film Décalogue 8, Krzysztof Kieślowski was inspired by a story told to him by Hanna Krall. Subsequently, the Polish writer wanted to make a book, published in Warsaw in 2011. Margot Carlier has just translated it into French for Noir sur blanc editions.

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There are words that carry, like those of Svetlana Alexievitch after her Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015: " I discovered the world through people like Hanna Krall and Ryszard Kapuściński ". And it is no coincidence that the following year, Margot Carlier gathered some of their reports from the same publisher under a title rich in meaning: The sea in a drop of water.

Hanna Krall would therefore be a writer capable of grasping the universal in a singular story. But the metaphor is reversible. Adam Michnik, editor-in-chief of the great Warsaw daily newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, who published it extensively like so many other figures in Polish literary reporting, wrote: " We said that reporting was an art that allowed to see a drop of water in the sea. ”In other words, Hannah Krall would also be able to distinguish the singularities in anonymity from the crowd.

Simply understand

The lives of Maria is a dazzling demonstration of this double power. During the war, Maria initially agreed to become the godmother of a Jewish girl, at the request of her mother, who hoped that a baptism certificate would allow her to survive. A practicing Catholic, the benefactor nevertheless retracts at the last moment so as not to have to make false testimony. The starting point of this book could be basically a simple anecdote in the tragic ocean of the Shoah.

We remember, for example, the Neighbors of the historian Jan Gross, who showed, if he was still needed, how much the Polish Jews had to face, in addition to the Nazi genocidaires, the sometimes homicidal hostility of their fellow Catholics . Here, anti-Semitism drew in part from a religious identity confused with the national identity, sometimes experienced up to fanaticism .

But “to be a reporter, writes another master of Polish literary reporting, Mariusz Szczygieł, is to understand. Understand why the being described behaves thus and not otherwise. Do not criticize, do not complete, do not praise, do not judge, do not embellish, but understand. "

For Hannah Krall, it is also to thwart the comforts of common morality and to go, as she did in the time of communism, towards what can cause embarrassment, not to condemn, but to bring precisely who discovers her story on the way of inconvenient identification. We must therefore try to write (…), prescribes Wojciech Tochman, another of his disciples, so that the reader, if only for a short time, enters the skin of the hero. Let him shiver and think: it could also happen to me. "

Understand the ambiguity

In The Lives of Maria, however, there are not really heroes, but ambiguous figures of which one does not know whether one should adore or hate them, forgive them or despise them. After the first publication of her book, which included three parts, the writer received the same day two testimonies on a perfectly secondary character, Stanisław Sojczyński.

In the morning, a letter from an unknown woman presented him as a murderer of Communists, condemned to death as such after the war. Later that day, the nephew of poet and playwright Tadeusz Różewicz reminded him on the phone of " the boundless admiration " of his uncle, whose commander he was in the Inner Army.

This double look made her want to write a fourth part to the book, before she discovered there what would provide the material for the fifth - and for the moment last - part: the two Władysław Sokół, perceived as the duplication of a single character, like Véronique-Weronika by Krzysztof Kieślowski.

More and more fragmentary, as the writing progresses, Hanna Krall's story becomes kaleidoscopic, capable of embracing in a few sentences each forgotten life of a country long martyred. " The bigger the tragedy, the fewer words it takes to describe it, " she says often. And his book in this sense is not only a lesson in literature, but a well of wisdom and good manners.

Hanna Krall, The Lives of Maria, Éditions Noir sur Blanc, 2020, 18 euros.

Also read by the same publisher, Hanna Krall, Ryszard Kapuściński, The sea in a drop of water, 2016 and the anthology of the Polish literary report, Life is a report, 2005.

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