Medallions in a collection of eight short reportage-like pieces about the horrors Nalkowska saw shortly after the end of world war 2. The books is famous in Poland, but not very well-known outside the country.
The stories are truly horrifying, about people who make soap out of human lipid matter, reports of pointless suffering and death by rural train tracks, where none of the witnesses dares offer help, for fear of reprisal. There are interviews with people who managed to survive in ghettoes, with nothing to eat. Stories from the camps, with stories of people reverting to autophagous practices. The short tone and sense of witnessing reminds me of another Polish writer, Hanna Krall. Also Ida Fink? The difference is that Nalkowska does not herself have a Jewish connection, I think.
Nalkowska was once a big deal in Polish literary life, but only a few of her numerous works are translated to English except Medallions. I’m not sure what is meant by the title. In one of the stories there is a woman who tends the local graves and when they are bombed there are medallions lying around. Maybe the image is meant to point to the terrible irony of military awards in the face of vast horrifying mass death.
This was translated to Swedish in 2017 by Emi-Simone Zawall. Her postscript frames the book as a great example of Polish literature, which annoys me mildly. To me, these stories should first and foremost be seen as testimony about the horrors of war, and any literary merits it might have should come in second place. She also manages to translate Izbica to Ibiza, which is kind of a big mistake for a translator from Polish. The book was also translated to Norwegian in 2022 by Julia Wiedlocha, published by Cappelen Damm.
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Kinship of all Species 