Handbook of Polish, Czech and Slovak Holocaust Fiction. Works and Contexts. A Short Introduction to the Project with Two Entries

Handbook of Polish, Czech and Slovak Holocaust Fiction is a work in progress aiming at becoming a standard reference work addressed to universities and public libraries and the broader public. It includes novels, short stories, poems and plays written in Polish, Czech and Slovak within the scope of 650 standard pages. The table of contents consists of 53 articles focused on Polish, 45 articles on Czech, and 23 articles on Slovak literature. The editors provide an introduction about the main developments of Holocaust literature in the broader context of three lands: crucial topics, situations, characters, motifs and places, periodization due to political changes, reception processes in the national and transnational context. The Handbook aims primarily at the researchers and readers in Western Europe and the U.S. where the Polish, Czech and Slovak Holocaust fiction remains largely unknown. The project results from the cooperation among researchers from Polish, Czech, German and Slovak universities. This article presents two entries from Polish and Czech literature.