The Girl’s War Experiences in Two Novels from Lodz by Honorata Chróścielewska: There Will Be No Lessons and We and the Herods

Abstract

The aim of the article is to analyse Honorata Chróścielewska’s novel There will be no more lessons from 1968, and the second part of her fictionalized memoirs We and the Herods from 1994, entitled Time accelerated. In both works, the fate of the heroine, bearing the same name Hanka each time, is linked to the image of the German occupation in Lodz. The period of external threat overlaps with the maturation process of a young high school girl who has to learn to discern on her own in the chaos of wartime reality and the complicated attitudes of her surroundings. A discussion of Chróścielewska’s works indicated in the title leads to the conclusion that the war, from the perspective of a young resident of Stare Bałuty, who comes from a working-class family, paradoxically turns out to be not only a time of testing character, but also serves long-term modernization and emancipation processes.