THE FINAL STATION: UMSCHLAGPLATZ (Umschlagplatz)

Novel by Jaroslaw Marek Rymkiewicz, 1988

The Final Station: Umschlagplatz, by Jaroslaw Marek Rymkiewicz, was published in Polish in 1988 and in English in 1994 in a translation by Nina Taylor. Like many literary works about the Holocaust, Umschlagplatz mixes a number of different genres. Madeline G. Levine describes it as a "hybrid blend of novel, confessional journal, meditative essay, and record of investigative research." It is classified by the Library of Congress system as both personal narrative and fiction. Levine places Umschlagplatz alongside other recent Polish literature, by authors such as Tadeusz Konwicki and Kazimierz Brandys, that also employs the "genre of the hybrid not-quite-autobio-graphical narrative that mixes deliberate fictions with apparently confessional autobiography." Umschlagplatz is not simply the creation of literary imagination, for the numerous sources of Warsaw Ghetto testimony cited and discussed in the text are not invented.

The narrator of Umschlagplatz is given the author's name and like the author is a Gentile Pole born in 1938 . This multileveled book includes the author's research into the description of the Umschlagplatz, from where the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto were herded onto the trains that would take them to their deaths in Treblinka. It also depicts a group of Jewish intellectuals and artists, invented by the narrator, who are on holiday in 1937 at the summer resort of Otwock, not far from Warsaw. In addition, there are switches to the present, where the narrator discusses with Hania, his assimilated Jewish wife, the historical reality of the book he is writing. Hania acts as a foil to the narrator, questioning the morality of his fictionalizing the lives of Jewish characters and giving him the opportunity to try to justify what he is doing. In reality the author's wife is not Jewish. The dividing line between fiction and reality in Umschlagplatz is deliberately blurred. Not only is the status of the "autobiographical" passages left open ("Maybe I invented it all … [but] even if I've invented it all, including you [Hania] … it is no less true for all that"), but they are not always clearly separated from those passages that are acknowledged as fictional within the text.

The importance of Umschlagplatz is not as an essay about the physical layout of the Umschlagplatz or about the details of the deportation of the Jews from Otwock but, rather, as an inquiry into what the murder of Polish Jews on Polish soil signified or should signify for Poles now: "I am chiefly interested in the future. What does Umschlagplatz signify in Polish life and Polish spirituality, and what does it portend for posterity? We live within the orbit of their death." Although the narrator stresses that "'it is only as a Christian that I can address the problem. And a Christian testimony, to my mind, is what we need,"' his lack of "practical experience of Polish-Jewish life … prevents [him from] writing an unfictionalized testimony," although his ideal remains for the book to tell "the common history of Poles and Jews as it really was, with no imaginary additives."

Umschlagplatz then is partly an attempt to persuade Poles to confront their true history, despite their lack of any desire to do so: "Perhaps we genuinely don't want to remember—I don't mean what happened to our Jews, but what happened to us as onlookers. Perhaps it is ourselves we would rather forget about." The book is also noteworthy, however, for its discussion of the limits of fictional representation in Holocaust literature within the text, when it has become almost a characteristic of the genre (Thomas Keneally , Martin Amis, Helen Darville) to confine this to an author's note placed outside the text.

The book is centered on an emotional assertion of the narrator's right to testify as a witness despite the fact that he was a child at the time and remembers nothing but "broken scraps and fragments": "I think I am a suitable witness, and I feel that I not only can but should testify. Even if I cannot testify to their lives, it will be my own personal act of remembrance … So you [Hania are] wrong to accuse me of wholesale fiction-mongering. You surely can't mean that my great dirge for the Polish Jews is imagined … And surely, my testimony is not imagined either. My dirge is a lament for myself. When I mourn for the Polish Jews it is an act of self-mourning, the lament of a Pole forever forsaken by Polish Jews."

—Alan Polak