Beautiful Mrs Seidenman

Born in Warsaw in 1928, Andrzej Szczypiorski took part in the city's uprising against German occupation in 1944 and was subsequently sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. After the war, he worked as author and publisher and became a member of the executive board of the Polish PEN Club and the Writer's Association. In December 1981, he was interned in a camp and remained a prisoner there until spring 1982. In 1989, he was chosen as a candidate by Solidarnosc and elected to the Polish Senate by the people. He received the Austrian State Award for European Literature and the German Federal Republic Order of Merit. Szczypiorski died in Warsaw in 2000.

Dense, lyrical and deeply unsettling... Szczypiorski creates in these pages a kaleidoscopic portrait of life in Nazi-occupied Warsaw... By focusing on a couple of weeks in the lives of a dozen Warsaw residents Szczypiorski is able to delineate the consequences of World War II on a group of ordinary citizens, and the place of that war within the arc of Polish history... As Szczypiorski sees it, good and evil, heroism and cowardice, are not the stuff of high tragedy; they are simply elements of daily life, occasionally thrown into relief by events like war and persecution. Thanks to the trickery of luck and grace, innocence may be redeemed by a mercenary act, as easily as it may be saved through genuine charity and compassion; injustice may result from carelessness and bad timing, as easily as it may proceed from bigotry and hatred.