Non-human nature, narrativity and the Holocaust: Seweryna Szmaglewska’s Smoke over Birkenau

This article by Ramsden examines the deeply ecological dimensions of Smoke over Birkenau, the 1945 Holocaust memoir of Seweryna Szmaglewska, a writer and member of the Polish Resistance who was imprisoned in Auschwitz-Birkenau between October 1942 and January 1945. Through an ecocritical reading of the memoir, it seeks to show how Szmaglewska mobilized an ecological strategy of narration to recount the self and traumatic experience during the Holocaust. Throughout her account, Szmaglewska showed a preoccupation with nature and the earth’s non-human actors, vividly invoking the singing larks and crickets, swaying bluebells and trembling ponds of Auschwitz-Birkenau as well as its surrounding woodlands and meadows. Writing and remembering the camp—and herself in it—through its non-human nature, Ramsen demonstrates, not only enabled Szmaglewska to bear witness to and make sense of her own traumatic past, but to write herself both in and out of it in a manner that made possible its retrospective recounting. To uncover and play close critical attention to Smoke over Birkenau’s ecological qualities is to glean a more complex understanding of how Szmaglewska responded to the Holocaust in its immediate aftermath. While hers is a unique memoir that blurs the generic boundaries between historical narrative and nature writing, Ramsden reveals that engagement with the role played by non-human nature in Holocaust testimonies, more broadly, has the potential to deepen our knowledge of the ways in which survivors remembered, reimagined and represented their difficult wartime experiences.