Smoke over Birkenau, written by Seweryna Szmaglewska is based on her own experience as an Auschwitz-Birkenau prisoner. She was arrested in 1942 by the Gestapo for participation in Underground activities and soon sent to Birkenau, where she spent three years until being transported to Germany in the early days of January 1945 as the concentration camp was evacuated to the west, retreating from the approaching Red Army. Fortunately, she managed to escape from the evacuation transport in January 1945 and came back to Poland. As soon as she ran away from the camp, she started writing her book which was completed in July 1945 and was published at the very end of the year of 1945. Her book became a valuable testimony in the Nuremberg Trials in 1946 and she was even requested to testify as a witness in the trial. Her book has been reprinted more than twenty times and is still regarded as one of the best novels of "literature of fact" which describes explicitly the cruelty of the Nazi concentration camps in Auschwitz and Birkenau. Szmaglewska's narration is indifferent and unemotional, compared to other authors such as T.Borowski or Z.Kossak. She simply states the naked facts without any editorial comments. Therefore her novel appears even more factual and harsh. In my paper I am focusing on the structure and the contents of "Smoke over Birkenau", and discussing the variety of problems which appeared in everyday life in Auschwitz-Birkenau such as illnesses and their medical treatments, severe work inside and outside the camp, the life in barracks, and death in the gas chambers.

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国立情報学研究所で電子化