A Chance Encounter and Other Stories of Polish Jewry

Alexandra Sosnowski is an assistant professor in the Department of
German and Slavic Studies, University of Manitoba.

As we approach the year 2000, the number of World War II survivors may
be decreasing, but their published accounts are on the rise. The driving
force behind the 15 stories in this collection is the survivor’s need
to record memories of the war before they “get dimmer and then fade
totally away.” A character from the story “My Darling Sister”
tells her story to “remind the world of what was done to us.”

The author herself spent the war years in the Urals, Russia, and was
thus spared the horror of the Holocaust experienced by the Jewish
population. The heroes in these stories (by and large women) speak for
themselves. Their tales are all structured in much the same fashion: the
narrator meets a hero, who tells her a story. The story of Anna Baum, on
the other hand, is gradually revealed through successive episodes in her
life when she meets her prospective “story tellers.” In comparison
to the harsh war experiences of her compatriots, her own seem rather
mild.