Polish Camp Literature

Polish Camp Literature expands the boundaries of Polish camp literature, which has so far been defined too narrowly. This restricted outlook has been determined by politics, ideology, the scarcity of historical knowledge, the lack of literary research, and frequent manipulation concerning terms such as "concentration camp", "forced labor camp", and "death camp". Camp literature was initially limited to "Lager" literature (pertaining to Nazi German camps). Over time, gulag literature (pertaining to Soviet camps) came to be included as well. It turns out that Polish camp literature is much more extensive and richer. This volume consists of mini-monographs on Polish literary works concerning either a specific camp or a specific type (system) of camps. The chapters devoted to gulag literature (i.e. texts about the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp and Lager literature (i.e. texts about Konzentrationslager Buchenwald) expand on established findings, while the following chapters deal with topics previously unexplored, namely, the literature relating to Polish camps, such as the prewar Place of Isolation in Bereza Kartuska and the postwar communist concentration and labor camps in Łambinowice and Jaworzno, the Spanish (Francoist) Campo de Concentración de Miranda de Ebro, and the Japanese Unit 731 and its research center in Pingfang (Manchuria), which included – on top of laboratories and chemical and bacteriological weapons production units – a prison, a gas chamber, and crematoria. This book is intended to provide the impetus not just for further investigation into the unknown and insufficiently recognized areas of Polish camp literature, but also – through embedding the Polish literary output in the context of other national literatures, and by means of their cross-comparison – for charting a map of world camp literature.

Arkadiusz Morawiec is a Professor at the Faculty of Philology at the University of Łódź and a literary critic. His research focuses on the history of the 20th- and 21st-century Polish literature; he is especially interested in texts concerned with totalitarianism, genocide (including the Holocaust), and concentration and extermination camps. He has published eight books, including Polish Literature and Genocide (2022), and has edited and co-edited eleven monographs, including The Literature in/after Concentration and Death Camps (2017) and Zagłada wobec innych ludobójstw [Holocaust in the context of other genocides] (2020).