Anna Janko - A Little Annihilation: a memoir

A reflection on children in war and second-generation trauma

June 1, 1943, Eastern Poland. Within just a few hours, the village of Sochy had ceased to exist. Buildings were burned. Residents shot. Among the survivors was nineyear-old Teresa Ferenc, who saw her family murdered by German soldiers, and would never forget what she witnessed the day she became an orphan. The horror of that event was etched into her very being and passed on to her daughter, author Anna Janko. A Little Annihilation bears witness to both the crime and its aftershocksthe trauma visited on the next generationas revealed in a beautifully scripted and deeply personal motherdaughter dialogue. As she fathoms the full dimension of the tragedy, Janko reflects on memory and loss, the ethics of helplessness, and the lingering effects of war.

Praise for A Little Annihilation

Scenes from the war live on as trauma in the memory of the next generation. A Little Annihilation by Anna Janko is an extraordinarily personal and powerful account of how the worst wartime atrocities affect ordinary people and are seldom recorded in the official histories.

OLGA TOKARCZUK

A Little Annihilation explores war and the relentless grind of history on a human scaleand as such, it is a haunting word of warning for the present and the future.

European Literature Network

This is a book about children in war and how we inherit traumafactual and unflinching, but touching and tender As with Svetlana Alexievichs reportage, in this book war is shown not only as a tragic episode in history, but as a living memory, which even after many years puts us on our guard as a danger which could recur.

Lithub

An exceptional book. Exceptional not just because we believe the author when she speaks of her genetic trauma, but due to the powerful language which conveys her sadness, anger, and goading irony, while verging on cynicism. Emotional truth emanates from this book.

Gazeta Wyborcza

This book argues strongly against the view that instances of war-related trauma can be ranked in a hierarchy.

Wprost

Janko has masterfully combined her mothers memories, accounts from other members of the family who could tell their own versions of the story, and references to academic texts and essays with her own testimony about inheriting such memories and facing the burden and restrictions they impose.

Onet.pl

This is powerful testimony. It is our duty not only to read it, but also to pass it on in turn Perhaps so that never again will another child be a witness to such horrors.

Babelio

War-time trauma can be carried over to the next generations and Anna Janko creates a powerful story of her inherited fear. This is a daring book about dealing with the painful family memories of World War II and the Holocaust, and about processing the hereditary trauma which has become part of Jankos DNA .

ANNA BLASIAK

This shocking yet tender story rendered me speechless for several hours. Anna Janko drags her familys tragic past out from the recesses of memory, but she also provides us with a lifeline.

WIOLETTA GREG

Jankos book digs deep into the past and into memory to examine the poisonous influence of family trauma throughout the years. Its a harrowing journey, and a painful look at the fate of children in war. What makes the book so compelling despite that is the sheer amount of historical, creative and emotional work that we witness Janko doing in order to process what happened.

MARTA DZIUROSZ

ANNA JANKO is one of the best-known contemporary Polish writers. A poet and literary critic, Janko was nominated for the Nike Literary Prize in 2001 and 2013 and the Angelus Central European Literature Award in 2008. She has won many other awards and literary prizes including the City of Gdask Book of the Year in 1981 and the Dresden Independent Writers Society Prize in 1993 for her entire poetic oeuvre.

PHILIP BOEHM is an American playwright, theater director, and literary translator whose career has zigzagged across languages, borders, and cultural divides. He studied at the State Academy of Theater in Warsaw, Poland, and has directed extensively on both sides of the Atlantic. He has translated more than thirty novels and plays, mostly by German and Polish writers including Herta Mller, Franz Kafka, and Hanna Krall. For this work he has received numerous awards, including fellowships from the NEA and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

AUTHOR

I wrote A Little Annihilation for my mother when she got very sick. I didnt want the history of her childhood village to disappear with her. I compared her fading memories to the written and photographic documents I had collected, to the accounts of the few other remaining witnessesand to my memories of her memories. When my mother read the book, she went into deep shock. For three days she cried, like back when she was a child during the war after losing her parents. It was a cleansing cry: therapeutic.

TRANSLATOR

I always first listen to the original work until I can start hearing its voice or voices in English. Here, the task is particularly challenging due to this books hybrid nature: memoir and memory, eyewitness reports and vicarious recollection, historical discourse and personal dialogueall of which needs to be communicated while retaining Jankos trademark poetic style. It is my hope that the translation allows the reader to enter the very dark world of Poland in 1943and then to leave it, perhaps with a deeper understanding of our own.

PUBLISHER

Anna Jankos book impressed me a lot. Her story about how her mother as a child witnessed the killing of her whole village is heartrending. Janko manages to write about this horrendous experience in beautiful language, with the sensitivity of a poets eye. She shows how the deep wounds in her mothers past continue to leave their trail throughout the rest of her mothers life as well as that of her own as a daughter. This book tells a very important story about how the children of war survivors inherit their parents pain and how the effects of war persist long after war itself has ended.

anna janko

a little annihilation

Translated from the Polish

by Philip Boehm

WORLD EDITIONS

New York, London, Amsterdam

Published in the USA in 2020 by World Editions LLC , New York

Published in the UK in 2020 by World Editions Ltd., London

World Editions

New York/London/Amsterdam

Copyright Anna Janko / Wydawnictwo Literackie, Krakw, 2015

English translation copyright Philip Boehm, 2020

Cover image Anna Janko, family archive

Author portrait Wydawnictwo Literackie

The quote in ch. That time is from The Iliad by Homer, translation by Samuel Butler, accessed from classics.mit.edu . The quote in ch. Precious little angel is from Hitlers First Photograph in View with a Grain of Sand by Wisawa Szymborska, translation by Stanisaw Baranczak and Clare Cavenagh, copyright 1995 by Harcourt, pg. 145.

The translator would like to thank the Polish Book Institute for a residency in support of this project.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

ISBN Trade paperback 978-1-64286-066-5