"I Wasn't Speaking About Myself!": Michał Głowiński's Late Holocaust Surviver's Testimony

The article is devoted to the autobiographical prose of Michał Głowiński, a major Polish literary scholar and one of the representatives of the "late" Holocaust survivors' testimonies (1998–2016). For the first time, Głowiński decided to tell about his experience of life in the Warsaw ghetto and on the "aryan side" only after half a century of silence. The reasons that prevented the systematic, consistent verbalization of the trauma (necessary to overcome it) during the socialist period are examined (lack of a safe environment); the peculiarities of Głowiński's narrative and their artistic and psychological prerequisites and tasks are analyzed (including the distinctive differences between texts marking different stages of trauma work). The fragmentary nature of the narration and its connection with the specificity of traumatized childhood memory, separated from the moment of articulation by a temporal distance, are investigated. The mosaicism of the narrative is shown to be evidence of the limited expressiveness of the Holocaust and the continuity it disrupted as well. The autopsychotherapeutic significance of reconstructing not only facts but also emotions is emphasized. The tasks of introducing metatext as an instrument of dialogue with the self-child, unifying biography, and gaining power over its meanings are analyzed. Głowiński's autobiographical narrative (reconstructing and conceptualizing events of the past) is ultimately aimed at integrating fragments of the text of life into a single text of fate. Processing trauma through autobiographical narrative also allows (therapeutically) transforming the meaning of tragedy.