The Final Station: Umschlagplatz [Hardcover]

Jaroslaw M. Rymkiewicz (Author), Nina Taylor (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1994

A uniquely personal Polish account of the Holocaust. At once a meditation, journal, and a novel, this work includes a reconstruction of the minutest details of genocide and a fictional account of a group of Jewish and Christian friends meeting shortly before the war for a summer of frivolity.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In a moving if sometimes awkward blend of fiction, history, meditation and autobiography, a Polish Christian, poet, essayist and playwright ponders a central question: How did the collapse of moral responsibility permit so many gentile Poles to denounce, betray and murder Polish Jews? As a crucial corollary theme, he considers the issue of why God allowed the Holocaust to occur. Umschlagplatz, the square in the Warsaw ghetto that served as the debarkation point for Jews packed into trains destined for the Nazi death camps, haunts Rymkiewicz's searching, expertly translated narrative. He painstakingly reconstructs the square's topography, mining histories, diaries and survivors' accounts. The book's chief fictive element involves a group of Jewish and Christian friends who meet at the dilapidated summer resort of Otwock in 1937 to romance and to discuss the looming, though not fully recognized menace of Hitler. The author's account of the Germans' 1942 extermination of the Otwock Jewish community (in conjunction with their annihilation of the Warsaw ghetto) makes this a valuable addition to Holocaust literature.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The author, a Christian Polish poet, essayist, playwright, and translator, is obsessed by his fellow Poles' treatment of Jews during World War II. At once a meditation, a journal, and a novel, this work agonizes over why the Poles blackmailed and denounced Jews, displaying a sense of collective guilt for the Polish people. The Umschlagplatz, the area of the Warsaw ghetto in which Jews were gathered for deportation to the death camps, is selected as the focus of Rymkiewicz's chronicle because events there happened right under the noses of Warsaw's Polish Christian community. The author cites many Jewish memoirs and accounts of the time, including those by Emanuel Ringeblum, Aron Kaplan, Adam Caerniakow, and Marek Edelman. A fictional passage depicting Jews and Christians at a summer resort before the war is particularly poignant. This well-researched account of the Poles' relationship to the Holocaust is recommended for most libraries.
- Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, Md.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 327 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T); 1st edition (March 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374154953
• ISBN-13: 978-0374154950
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,251,139 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the Final Station: Umschlagplatz, July 11, 2002

By 

George Epp (Rosthern, Saskatchewan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Final Station: Umschlagplatz (Hardcover)

This book came to me as a surprize. My wife is a librarian and she brought it to me "on spec". I've renewed it twice since. Rymkiewicz weaves here an extraordinary collage of thought and emotion, reason and passion as he leads us through the spectre that was the holocaust in Poland. The narrator is elusive, as if he were the collective mind of all those who lived through the terrible days of the Warsaw Ghetto, its precursors and its aftermath. There is guilt here for the massive consent -- if not cooperation -- with the NAZIs. There is sorrow over the helplessness of ordinary people run over, figuratively, by the tanks and uniforms of the totalitarian state. All is told in a style that defies description in conventional terms; time and substance swim back and forth, making this more a collage of humanity at its weakest and worst rather than a narrative of a single event. A good read, with amazing quotes.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a brilliant tour de force of both literary and moral merit., November 10, 1997

By 

Leucippe (new york, ny USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Final Station: Umschlagplatz (Hardcover)

Rymkiewicz's engagement with the past events of the Holocaust, as focused through his own forgotten childhood encounter with the liquidation of Jews in Poland, is a brilliant literary accomplishment and a work of high moral value. It is the first sustained treatment by a Pole of the tragedy that befell the Jews of Poland, whose absent presence haunts every page, and it does so through a complex and imaginative structure that draws on documentary sources and fictional recreation of a world the author could not know. The grudging Kirkus review, cited above, does not do justice to this bold and daring work. Read it for yourselves.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating novel of Polish perspective on Jewish Holocaust, December 17, 1995

By A Customer

This review is from: The Final Station: Umschlagplatz (Hardcover)

The author was a child during the extermination of the Warsaw Ghetto, and
describes the Polish wartime experience in relation to that of the Jews he saw being
deported to extermination.

Occasionally apologetic, sometimes confrontative about responsibility, I found the book
to be very readable. Flashbacks/forwards are potentially confusing.

Certainly a different slant from the typical Holocaust memoir.