The sci-fi writer Stanisław Lem, who survived the Holocaust but rarely discussed his wartime experiences, was haunted by the idea that losses can overwhelm the human capacity to apprehend them.
Lem worked in the company’s garage as an auto mechanic and an electrician, a placement probably bought by his parents. But the immunity conferred by the position didn’t last. In November, 1942, even Jews with Nazi-approved work permits began being transported. By the end of the year, waste-sorting operations were transferred to Janowska, a work camp that later became a death camp.
In July, 1945, as it became clear that the Soviets would annex Lwów, the Lems left for Kraków. Their financial resources seem to have been exhausted. Lem’s father, who was in his late sixties and had a heart condition, took a job in a hospital, and the family squeezed into a two-bedroom apartment with their old friends from Lwów. Lem’s father received a grant from a Jewish group that was helping refugees get their footing in Poland, but it was an uncertain time.
Lem later called it “the first book of which I’m not ashamed.” But it was rejected by publishers, who told Lem that its embrace of socialism wasn’t fervent enough, and suggested that he add more explicitly partisan sequels. Lem obliged, but, by the time the trilogy was published, in 1955, Joseph Stalin was dead, and the compliant politics of the sequels spoiled the reception of the first novel.
His first full-length sci-fi novel came out in 1951, under the title “Astronauts,” a word still so unfamiliar that people confused it with “argonauts.” It has never appeared in English, but, according to the Canadian Lem scholar Peter Swirski, its conceit is that a mysterious explosion over the Siberian town of Tunguska in 1908, usually attributed to a meteorite, was really caused by the crash of a Venusian spaceship.
Gajewska speculates that the sense of emotional dislocation in Lem’s fiction comes from a feeling of not being at home in Poland, despite his prosperity. “Return from the Stars” begins, “I took nothing with me, not even a coat.” After a ten-year voyage at almost light speed, an astronaut named Hal Bregg returns to Earth, where, in accordance with Einstein’s theory of relativity, a hundred and twenty-seven years have elapsed. Nothing is familiar: bookstores no longer stock ink-on-paper books.
Such prickliness may reflect the insecurity that Lem felt in his homeland. “We shall not prevent Polish citizens of Jewish nationality from returning to Israel if they wish to do so,” the leader of Poland’s Communist Party declared in 1968, the year after the Soviet Union sided with Arab nations in the Six-Day War. “We do not want a Fifth Column in our country.” The comments set off a wave of anti-Semitism and a purge of supposed Zionists from Poland’s government.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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