Dorota Burda-Fischer

The article delves into the profound meaning of home for refugees, a concept that takes on a new depth when one's homeland is ravaged by war. It examines the contrasting experiences of the Polish writer Stanisław Vincenz and his Jewish friend Benedykt Liebermann, both  rom the Eastern Carpathian region. Despite their different paths, both individuals demonstrated remarkable resilience. Vincenz, while in exile, poetically recreated in memory his childhood Carpathian home, which allowed him to continue his writing. For Liebermann attempted to build a new home in pre-state Israel after being uprooted, the destruction of Jewish life in his former hometown made recovering a sense of home immensely difficult. The author of the article suggests that philosophies about memory’s role in preserving a home have limits, as the trauma of losing one’s home is a highly personal experience. For Jewish refugees, that rupture severed entire cultural worlds in a way that defied simple remedies.

The article examines subjective memories of two writers, Stanisław Vincenz and Aharon Appelfeld, who both omit central historical aspects while describing their Holocaust experiences. The works of the Polish writer Stanisław Vincenz and an excerpt from a work by the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld are interpreted while considering the role of historiographic metafiction in modern literature. Though the experiences of both authors are fairly different, their silence may be treated as an act of conscious forgetting, or as a mindful choice of Holocaust recollection. It is suggested that this silence actually offers a valuable perspective for both literary and historical research. While Appelfeld’s experience of the Holocaust was different from that of Vincenz, the silence of the authors carries profound meanings. Reading Vincenz and Appelfeld as historiographic metafiction is to read their silence.