Hanna Krall
Author of Shielding the Flame
About the Author
Works by Hanna Krall
Associated Works
Description of a Struggle: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Eastern European Writing (1994) — Contributor — 79 copies, 1 review
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Krall, Hanna
- Other names
- Krall-Szperkowicz, Hanna (Nom d'alliance)
- Birthdate
- 1935-05-20
- Gender
- female
- Education
- Université de Varsovie (Diplôme, Journalisme)
Programme international d'écriture de l'Iowa - Occupations
- Journaliste
Dramaturge
Holocaust survivor
novelist - Organizations
- Gazeta Wyborcza, Journal (Formatrice, Journalisme, 19 90 | )
"Tor" Film Group (Directrice littéraire, 19 82 | 19 87)
Polityka, Journal (Journaliste, 19 69 | 19 81)
Życie Warszawy, Journal (Journaliste, 19 55 | 19 69)
Union des écrivains polonais (Membre)
Association des écrivains polonais (Membre) - Awards and honors
- Leipziger Buchpreis zur Europäischen Verständigung (Hauptpreis ∙ 2000)
Würth-Preis für Europäische Literatur (2012)
Médaille du Mérite culturel polonais Gloria (2014)
Commandeur de l'ordre Polonia Restituta (2004) - Relationships
- Szperkowicz, Jerzy (Epoux)
- Short biography
- Hanna Krall was born to a Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland. Her parents were Salomon and Felicja Jadwiga Krall. Her father and other relatives died during the Holocaust, while she and her mother survived with the help of several Catholic Poles, constantly moving between hiding places. In 1955, Hanna graduated from the journalism school at the University of Warsaw and began working as a journalist for major Polish newspapers. She lived in the Soviet Union from 1966 to 1969 as a foreign correspondent for the weekly Polityka. Her experiences during that period provided material for three volumes of collected articles. After the introduction of martial law in Poland in 1981, she became a freelance writer and novelist. From 1982 to 1987, she also worked for the Tor film studio, where she collaborated on screenplays with director Krzysztof Kieślowski, among others. Hanna first made her name in 1977 with the publication of Shielding the Flame, a nonfiction work based on an interview with cardiologist Marek Edelman, one of the founders of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB) and a leader of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Her most successful book has been the novel Chasing the King of Hearts (2006), which was translated into 17 languages and earned many awards, including the German Würth Preis for European Literature in 2012 and the Found in Translation Award in 2014. She has been married since 1959 to journalist Jerzy Szperkowicz, with whom she has a daughter.
- Nationality
- Poland
- Birthplace
- Warsaw, Poland
- Associated Place (for map)
- Warsaw, Poland
Members
Reviews
Izolda is Jewish and living in Poland at a time when being Jewish is dangerous. Her husband, Shayek, has been arrested by the Nazis. And Izolda is left to fend for herself. She is nothing if not determined – determined to escape the Ghetto, determined to evade arrest herself, determined to survive, determined to find her husband who she loves. Even when she finds herself in Auschwitz, she clings to hope and trusts she will survive the war and be reunited with Shayek.
Based on a true story, show more Hanna Krall’s novella, Chasing the King of Hearts, is a poignant story of love and survival. Written in a surprisingly off-hand style, the book exposes the horror of the Holocaust. Krall has a way of showing just how arbitrary life and death were within the Warsaw ghetto, the concentration camps, and elsewhere in Poland during this horrible time in history. There are moments of humor mixed in with unimaginable images of torture and suffering. Izolda is a captivating character who comes alive on the page. To survive she must use her finely honed sense of what is safe and what is not, she must keep moving, she must accept help where she can and risk everything.
Krall includes real black and white photos in her short book which reminds the reader that this is not wholly fiction, but something between fiction and reality. I found myself moved by these simple photos, faces looking out at a camera that reminded me that yes, there were these people…real people…who lived through something we can only vaguely imagine.
Peirene Press is known for their short, literary works and this one is particularly good. Krall’s writing is poetic with a simplicity that transforms her story into something amazing. This is a book which will appeal to readers who love literary and historical fiction.
Chasing the King of Hearts is a translated work and is only now available for the first time in English. The book won the 2013 English Pen Award, and was shortlisted for the Angelus Central European Literary Award.
Highly recommended. show less
Based on a true story, show more Hanna Krall’s novella, Chasing the King of Hearts, is a poignant story of love and survival. Written in a surprisingly off-hand style, the book exposes the horror of the Holocaust. Krall has a way of showing just how arbitrary life and death were within the Warsaw ghetto, the concentration camps, and elsewhere in Poland during this horrible time in history. There are moments of humor mixed in with unimaginable images of torture and suffering. Izolda is a captivating character who comes alive on the page. To survive she must use her finely honed sense of what is safe and what is not, she must keep moving, she must accept help where she can and risk everything.
Krall includes real black and white photos in her short book which reminds the reader that this is not wholly fiction, but something between fiction and reality. I found myself moved by these simple photos, faces looking out at a camera that reminded me that yes, there were these people…real people…who lived through something we can only vaguely imagine.
Peirene Press is known for their short, literary works and this one is particularly good. Krall’s writing is poetic with a simplicity that transforms her story into something amazing. This is a book which will appeal to readers who love literary and historical fiction.
Chasing the King of Hearts is a translated work and is only now available for the first time in English. The book won the 2013 English Pen Award, and was shortlisted for the Angelus Central European Literary Award.
Highly recommended. show less
Chasing the King of Hearts tells the story of Izolda, who meets Shayek in Warsaw during WWII and marries him. They live first in the ghetto until Izolda, who is unrelentingly resourceful and determined, smuggles herself out. She manages to get Shayek out too, as well as their parents but the war is harsh and unrelenting and over time their family members disappear or are arrested. Shayek is eventually arrested and all of Izolda's ingenuity is focused on getting to him. She endures much and show more survives because of her ability to think on her feet and to take any chances she sees.
From the beginning of the story we know that Izolda survives. There are segments set long after the war, when Izolda is an elderly woman living in Israel trying to tell her story to her grandchildren. The reader knows that she lives, but how she survives makes for quite a story. Izolda is a real person, who found the author, Hanna Krall, and asked her to write her story for her. Krall is well respected as a journalist in Poland and documents people's experiences in a narrative style much like Svetlana Alexievich. Here, she tells Izolda's story in a straight-forward way, eliding much of the harsher moments, but without omitting them. The reader knows Izolda is raped or that the conditions of her imprisonment were harsh, but these events are presented as facts, less important than her overriding need to find her husband.
She follows the policewoman.
The nearest station is on Poznanska Street. Not a good place, getting out won't be easy.
She has her pearl ring. She thinks: Should I give it to her right away? And why did she say you're all alike? By all she means Jews. Excuse me, Ma'am, she risks the question. What did you mean by all alike? Stop playing dumb--the policewoman now makes no effort to be polite. I'm from the vice squad, now do you understand?
Now she understands.
They're not taking her for a Jew but for a whore. What a relief, thank God, they're just taking me for a whore.
The sheer number of close calls and daring escapes experienced by this single woman would sound unlikely in a novel, but Izolda's personality and determination made each unlikely moment feel inevitable. This is an extraordinary story. show less
From the beginning of the story we know that Izolda survives. There are segments set long after the war, when Izolda is an elderly woman living in Israel trying to tell her story to her grandchildren. The reader knows that she lives, but how she survives makes for quite a story. Izolda is a real person, who found the author, Hanna Krall, and asked her to write her story for her. Krall is well respected as a journalist in Poland and documents people's experiences in a narrative style much like Svetlana Alexievich. Here, she tells Izolda's story in a straight-forward way, eliding much of the harsher moments, but without omitting them. The reader knows Izolda is raped or that the conditions of her imprisonment were harsh, but these events are presented as facts, less important than her overriding need to find her husband.
She follows the policewoman.
The nearest station is on Poznanska Street. Not a good place, getting out won't be easy.
She has her pearl ring. She thinks: Should I give it to her right away? And why did she say you're all alike? By all she means Jews. Excuse me, Ma'am, she risks the question. What did you mean by all alike? Stop playing dumb--the policewoman now makes no effort to be polite. I'm from the vice squad, now do you understand?
Now she understands.
They're not taking her for a Jew but for a whore. What a relief, thank God, they're just taking me for a whore.
The sheer number of close calls and daring escapes experienced by this single woman would sound unlikely in a novel, but Izolda's personality and determination made each unlikely moment feel inevitable. This is an extraordinary story. show less
Shielding the Flame: An Intimate Conversation With Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising by Hanna Krall
I read this short book, first published in 1977 but now out of print, for the second time yesterday and it has lost nothing of its fascination. Although Hanna Krall chose a clumsy format, in which easy-to-flip-over passages of Marek Edelman's postwar career as a doctor, in which the focus is on saving life, alternate with an interview in which he describes the terrible times he lived through in the Warsaw Ghetto, where the focus is on death and mass murder and how he and a few people show more survived extinction when 400,000 other people did not, the book is a must-read for anybody interested in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
In the last days of the Ghetto, Marek Edelman was one of the leaders of the ZOB, the Jewish Combat Organization. After the war he eventually decided to stay in Poland, where for a long time he was forgotten until his interview with Hanna Krall and subsequently becoming one of the leaders of the Solidarity movement. During and after WWII, and during the communist anti-Semitic actions of 1968, the memory of a Jewish presence in Poland was nearly eliminated and the great majority of the surviving remnant of Polish-born Jews wanted nothing more to do with the country. The divorce of Polish and Jewish memory obscured the centuries of common history up until 1939.
The interview with Edelman, by Hanna Krall, that appeared in a Polish literary journal in 1976, was, according to Timothy Garton Ash in the preface, the moment when Jewish and Polish memory began to become aware of each other again. In today's Poland, where the Jewish presence is still largely non-existent, the whole country seems now to be fascinated with all things Jewish. Krall's interview with Edelman was made into a book in 1997, and it has since sold many copies in Poland.
Here is an excerpt from Timothy Garton Ash's introduction to the 1986 American translation of the book:
"By the beginning of 1943 there was only one real question for those still left inside the Warsaw Ghetto: "How should we die?" Edelman and his friends, most of them barely turned twenty, discussed it: "The majority of us favored an uprising. After all, humanity had decided that dying with arms was more beautiful than without arms. Therefore we followed this consensus." But was humanity right?
"Well, one thing is certain," says Edelman now, "It's much easier to die shooting. Anyway, people have always thought that shooting is the highest form of heroism. So we were shooting."
But on the upper floor of his hospital a mother was giving birth just as the Germans cleared people out of the lower floors, in the "liquidation action". The doctor handed the newborn baby to the nurse, who immediately smothered it with a pillow. The nurse was nineteen years old. "The doctor didn't say a thing to her. Not a word. And this woman knew herself what she was supposed to do." Elsewhere on the upper floor there were several rooms with sick children. As the Germans were entering the ground floor, a woman doctor managed to poison them all. "You see, Hanna," says Edelman, "you don't understand anything. She saved those children from the gas chamber. People thought she was a hero."
So what, then, in that world turned upside down, was heroism? Or honor? Or dignity? And where was God? Edelman's answer to this last question is startling. God, he says, was on the side of the persecutors. A malicious God. Even today (in 1986), every time he has a heart patient on the operating table, he feels that he is competing with a malicious God to shield the flame of human life. "God is trying to blow out the candle and I'm quickly trying to shield the flame, taking advantage of his brief inattention."
Marek Edelman died on October 2, 2009 in Warsaw show less
In the last days of the Ghetto, Marek Edelman was one of the leaders of the ZOB, the Jewish Combat Organization. After the war he eventually decided to stay in Poland, where for a long time he was forgotten until his interview with Hanna Krall and subsequently becoming one of the leaders of the Solidarity movement. During and after WWII, and during the communist anti-Semitic actions of 1968, the memory of a Jewish presence in Poland was nearly eliminated and the great majority of the surviving remnant of Polish-born Jews wanted nothing more to do with the country. The divorce of Polish and Jewish memory obscured the centuries of common history up until 1939.
The interview with Edelman, by Hanna Krall, that appeared in a Polish literary journal in 1976, was, according to Timothy Garton Ash in the preface, the moment when Jewish and Polish memory began to become aware of each other again. In today's Poland, where the Jewish presence is still largely non-existent, the whole country seems now to be fascinated with all things Jewish. Krall's interview with Edelman was made into a book in 1997, and it has since sold many copies in Poland.
Here is an excerpt from Timothy Garton Ash's introduction to the 1986 American translation of the book:
"By the beginning of 1943 there was only one real question for those still left inside the Warsaw Ghetto: "How should we die?" Edelman and his friends, most of them barely turned twenty, discussed it: "The majority of us favored an uprising. After all, humanity had decided that dying with arms was more beautiful than without arms. Therefore we followed this consensus." But was humanity right?
"Well, one thing is certain," says Edelman now, "It's much easier to die shooting. Anyway, people have always thought that shooting is the highest form of heroism. So we were shooting."
But on the upper floor of his hospital a mother was giving birth just as the Germans cleared people out of the lower floors, in the "liquidation action". The doctor handed the newborn baby to the nurse, who immediately smothered it with a pillow. The nurse was nineteen years old. "The doctor didn't say a thing to her. Not a word. And this woman knew herself what she was supposed to do." Elsewhere on the upper floor there were several rooms with sick children. As the Germans were entering the ground floor, a woman doctor managed to poison them all. "You see, Hanna," says Edelman, "you don't understand anything. She saved those children from the gas chamber. People thought she was a hero."
So what, then, in that world turned upside down, was heroism? Or honor? Or dignity? And where was God? Edelman's answer to this last question is startling. God, he says, was on the side of the persecutors. A malicious God. Even today (in 1986), every time he has a heart patient on the operating table, he feels that he is competing with a malicious God to shield the flame of human life. "God is trying to blow out the candle and I'm quickly trying to shield the flame, taking advantage of his brief inattention."
Marek Edelman died on October 2, 2009 in Warsaw show less
Chasing the King of Hearts is a love story. Izolde expends much time and energy trying to find her husband, Shayek, who has been arrested and sent to Auschwitz, hoping to keep him alive, and get him out. She also tries to keep her family and his family safe.
Krall's understated delivery of Izolda's complex plans and efforts on behalf of her husband engage readers' attention. And providing details of Izolda's future life in Israel compel us to continue reading to learn what happens show more in-between.
Different in so many ways from other Holocaust memoirs I've read. Krall is more frank and open about what people had to do during the horrors of the Holocaust to survive, and help their families survive. Chasing the King of Hearts also describes in painful detail challenges survivors faced AFTER the war.
Reading this book will provide another perspective to this historical nightmare. show less
Krall's understated delivery of Izolda's complex plans and efforts on behalf of her husband engage readers' attention. And providing details of Izolda's future life in Israel compel us to continue reading to learn what happens show more in-between.
Different in so many ways from other Holocaust memoirs I've read. Krall is more frank and open about what people had to do during the horrors of the Holocaust to survive, and help their families survive. Chasing the King of Hearts also describes in painful detail challenges survivors faced AFTER the war.
Reading this book will provide another perspective to this historical nightmare. show less
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Statistics
- Works
- 35
- Also by
- 1
- Members
- 594
- Popularity
- #42,286
- Rating
- 3.8
- Reviews
- 16
- ISBNs
- 111
- Languages
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- Favorited
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