Whose story is it anyway?

By recounting the basic tales of lives torn apart by the Holocaust but propelling them into a future of possible consequences, Hanna Krall risks blending fact and fiction to a degree where neither remain credible. By Elena Lappin

The Woman from Hamburg And Other True Stories.
By Hanna Krall

Translated by Madeline G Levine. Other Press. €15.00

Although the work of the Polish journalist Hanna Krall is billed as nonfiction, it is not surprising that the title story in her collection, The Woman From Hamburg, appeared as fiction in a recent issue of the New Yorker. Krall's distinctive style could be called Holocaust gonzo journalism. She reports the basic facts but adds a novelistic twist, weaving her interviews into elegant, multilayered narratives.

In Madeline G Levine's subtle translation, Krall's deceptively artless prose speaks of real events with the power of fiction creating a mysterious fusion she acknowledges in her story Salvation: "My work as a reporter has taught me that logical stories, without riddles and holes in them, in which everything is obvious, tend to be untrue. And things that cannot be explained in any fashion really do happen."

Krall is drawn to unusual stories of Jews and non-Jews alike, and captures how they lived, died and coexisted before their Eastern European world was brutally destroyed, or while it was in the process of being destroyed. But rather than creating purely historical documentaries, Krall follows the consequences of these stories into the present.

In the very cinematic first tale, 'The Woman From Hamburg', an attractive young Jewish woman hidden from the Nazis by a childless Polish couple becomes pregnant by the man. During her pregnancy, the man's wife carries a pillow under her clothes; when the baby girl is born, the couple show her off to friends as their own. After the war, the Jewish woman disappears and the baby is raised by the couple. Throughout her childhood she receives packages from a woman in Hamburg, supposedly her godmother. Not until the girl is grown and her father is dying does he reveal that the woman in Hamburg is her real mother, and that she is Jewish.

In quick successive leaps, Krall propels the story forward to awkward meetings between mother and daughter ("Don't ever come here again," her mother tells her, "I don't want to remember"), then to two failed marriages and a son.

The significant questions are finally posed by the daughter's lawyer ("What do you really want?" he asks. "Her love or her estate?") and by her son. ("Which woman are you, really? And who are you?") The story ends with the answer she gives her son: "I am your mother." But also with the answer Krall believes the daughter ought to give: "I am the one who survived."

Here, as in all her tales, Krall's overly omniscient voice blends a little too easily with the dialogue we read as reported. As she recreates entire lives from interviews and other sources (which she cites in footnotes), the resulting narratives sometimes appear staged. Her authorial presence can be annoyingly intrusive, like a therapist imposing analysis on a patient who is barely aware of having a problem.

The Holocaust is a rarely mentioned yet omnipresent force in these stories, even long after the war ends. In 'Portrait With a Bullet in the Jaw', Krall revisits Poland with a man called Blatt, who now lives in California. The story tells us how he survived the war there, in hiding, and how others didn't. At the end, he asks: "Why are there no Jewish graves? Why is no one sad?"Krall continues: "Maybe because spectres are wandering about. They don't want to leave, since no one mourns for them, since no one weeps for them". In 'The Dybbuk', Adam S, an American born after the war, is tormented by the spirit of his 6 year old half-brother, who was killed in the Warsaw ghetto. It is not clear whether Krall is inviting the reader to accept the notion that this is a real 'dybbuk' – a soul inhabiting a living person's body – or whether she is suggesting Adam S is suffering from an extreme case of survivor's guilt. The result is the same: the past lives on in the present, and to exorcise it may be misguide; may, in fact, not be possible.

'Hamlet', the story of Andrzej Czajkowski, a Polish-born gay Jewish pianist who donates his skull to the theatre, is the most fascinating, problematic and personally revealing story in Krall's collection. Although they never actually met, Czajkowski and Krall were contemporaries.

She addresses him as 'you' throughout, telling him, a little judgmentally, the story of his life as she sees it: grandparents, parents, his early childhood in the Warsaw ghetto. Czajkowski was smuggled out to the Aryan side with his grandmother, while his mother chose to stay with her lover in the ghetto and later was murdered in Treblinka. The boy grows up with an inner rage against his mother.

Then, unexpectedly, Krall adds: "I shall tell you something now. I knew a certain girl. She was your age; she also had dark eyes like you and hair that was bleached with hydrogen peroxide. . . . I knew that little girl quite well, because I know what the Aryan side was for a child. It was a window that you do not go near, even though no one is watching you. . . . A wardrobe that you enter at the sound of the doorbell." The Aryan side was loneliness and silence. Krall tells how this little girl and her mother were brought to a police station by a blackmailer. They had false Aryan papers, given to them by a seamstress named Maria Ostrowska, but the policeman insisted on hearing them recite a Catholic prayer.

The mother could not, but the little girl did. While the grown-ups debated what exactly had persuaded the policeman to let them go, the little Jewish girl, Krall writes, had no doubt it was the addressee of the Christian prayer she had recited.

In the entry for Poland in the Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, published in 2004 by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, I came across an account, based in part on Krall's own testimony, of how one Maria Ostrowska-Ruszczynska, in the spring of 1943, saved the lives of Jadwiga Krall and her 6 year old daughter, Hanna. Perhaps it is easier for an author to tell the stories of others. But when Hanna Krall writes her own story some day in the first person, it will be hard to mistake it for fiction.

Elena Lappin is a novelist and journalist in London. She is writing a book about the Song of Songs

© 2005 The New York Times