The current movement of Poles and Jews towards some sort of dialogue inevitably confronts an obstacle of nearly insurmountable dimensions: the incommensurability of Polish and Jewish memories of the Nazi occupation and its aftermath. Poles and Polish Jews both inhabited the geographical centre of the Nazi hell, but their experiences were profoundly and irreducibly different. Yet too often, the attempt to understand founders before the assault of ‘facts': comparing numbers of Polish and Jewish dead, the relative prevalence of szmalcownicy (who blackmailed Jews) versus ‘righteous gentiles’ (who sheltered Jews), the proportion of Jews in the security apparatus of post-war Polish governments, and so on. Efforts are further thwarted because in the intervening forty years, Poles and Jews, for the most part geographically separated, have developed vastly different world-views rooted to a large extent in their disparate memories of the war and its aftermath.

Hanna Krall, born Jewish, survived the war as a child concealed in a succession of Polish homes, then remained in Poland through all the difficult years since, an active participant in Polish cultural and intellectual life. She is therefore a Jewish survivor in a double sense: of the war and in contemporary Poland. She is ‘Jewish’, however, if her books are any indication, purely by virtue of her war-time experience, that is, by virtue of having survived; Jewish history or culture are terra incognita to her. There are some others like her in contemporary Poland, but none, to my knowledge, who have chosen to write about it. Her previous book, about Marek Edelman, Łódź cardiologist and last survivor of the leadership of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, assaulted our conventional notions of heroism;1 Krall here reaches not for the ‘facts’, but for the deeper truth of her own life, and in so doing touches some of the darkness at the root of contemporary Polish-Jewish relations.

This is a difficult book to read; from all indications it was certainly a difficult one to write. The narrative spans a period beginning with the author's concealment during the Nazi occupation (hence the title), and ends on 13 December 1981, the day on which martial law was declared in Poland. It is far, however, from being a chronological account, nor is it an autobiography in any conventional sense.