of the ‘round town’⁸⁴⁰ is a person not only totally devoid of any narrative
talent, but also a person incapable of a more general, comprehensive approach.
This is why my ‘interview’ with him, which by the way slightly resembled
the famous American third-degree interrogation, consisted in snatching
not so much fragments of his memories as individual facts and events.
Therefore, the whole thing boils down to giving order to that silva rerum⁸⁴¹
in the full meaning of this term, this conglomerate of memories is offered
higgledy-piggledy, without any [. . .], and to combining it into a whole.
Developing this analogy to a person subjected to a third-degree interrogation,
I think that my task is more difficult. For the examined person at least
knows that it is possible to form, let us say, a square from the given elements
and that no element is missing. On the other hand, I am not only unsure
of that. Quite the opposite, I am aware that there will be some, or perhaps
many, holes. So in order to warn you and to stress that the following story is
not a continuous narration but just a collection, a loose handful of episodes
and trifles (trifles!), I chose the headline, which is the title of an anti-Semitic
work of a famous French writer — Céline.
The county seat of Koło located near Kalisz had approximately 20,000
inhabitants before the war, of which 30 per cent were Jewish⁸⁴².
It is one of the few towns which did not suffer any (or almost any) damage
in the course of the military operations. It was bombed during 2–4 September,
but the Germans were aiming at military objectives only and they damaged,
it seems accidentally, only three private houses. Moreover, the withdrawing
Polish army blew up two bridges on the River Warta. I will [2] take the
liberty to stress — following in Zola’s⁸⁴³ footsteps, who avoided paradoxes —
the “incredibility of truth:” the fact of the destruction of the two bridges
became a source of a real tragedy for the Jews later. But let us not move too
far ahead in time.
The Germans marched into Koło at midday on 12 September. Most probably
they wanted to spare the Jewish population an unpleasant disappointment,
840 In Polish, the name of the town translates as “circle.”
841 (Latin) literally: forest of objects, a form of literature encompassing non-homogenous texts of diverse subject matter.
842 Before the outbreak of the war, the population of Koło was approx. 13,000 people, including 4,560 Jews.
843 Emile Zola (1840–1902), French naturalist writer.
