Sara Nomberg-Przytyk’s “memoir in piece” is one of the most important ego documents of a Polish-Jewish woman’s life in the twentieth century. Nomberg-Przytyk spreads out before us the richness and contradictions of Polish-Jewish existence in communist Poland. Her multi-layered life is filled with immense personal and communal losses during the Holocaust, post-war pains and joys of love, marriage, and motherhood, and swift success as a Jewish female investigative journalist under the communist regime. Nomberg-Przytyk, a descendent of a religious Jewish family from Lublin, an Auschwitz survivor, a communist believer who would undergo an ideological transformation in the 1960s during the anti-Zionist/anti-Jewish campaign, poignantly shows how an individual’s life suffers at the hands of great historical forces. Nomberg-Przytyk’s memoir, impressively annotated, is a must-read for everyone in the fields of European History, the Holocaust, Gender, and Memories studies.

Joanna Michlic, University College London

Communist Poland: A Jewish Woman’s Experience is a breathtaking memoir of Nomberg-Przytyk, a Polish Jewish journalist born and raised in an Orthodox family during rabid antisemitism in Catholic Poland before WWII. Imprisoned at Auschwitz, she remained committed to communism in her naïve desire to rid Poland of antisemitism and social inequities. She was destroyed by the same communism for being a Jew, and forced to emigrate to Israel, stripped of the citizenship of the country to which she devoted most of her life and all of her professional passions. The book editors Holli Levitsky and Justyna Wlodarczyk created a masterful text providing extraordinary rich and nuanced historical detail and context to Sara’s memoir. Both the memoir and the extensive historical annotations make this text an important insightful historical document about those dramatic times, with superb quality of writing – making the book hard to put down.

Bohdan Oppenheim, Loyola Marymount University

As a firsthand Jewish witness of the Holocaust, a powerfully inventive creative writer, and a journalist navigating a new totalitarian regime in postwar Poland, Sara Nomberg-Przytyk has few rivals among European writers of her generation. Communist Poland, both a personal memoir and a closely-observed documentary record, is the portrait of a woman at the intersection of history. Composed through transcriptions of oral recollection, translation of several languages, and incisive editorial commentary, her life story is a scholarly and testimonial work of lasting importance.

Eric Sundquist, Johns Hopkins University

This remarkable autobiography by a woman who survived Auschwitz and subsequently became a prominent journalist in the Polish People’s Republic until she was forced to emigrate as a result of the ‘anti-Zionist’ campaign of 1968 is a microcosm of the tragic fate of the Jews in Poland. It is essential reading for all those interested in Polish-Jewish relations and the history of Poland in the twentieth century.

Antony Polonsky, Emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University and Chief Historian at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews

The book, while offering much interesting information about life in Poland in the first three decades after the war, serves as an exercise in memory studies and a critical evaluation of one’s life that includes the process of making sense of losses, mistakes, and accomplishments. The short chapters lend themselves to an informative reading for undergraduate students, but the book in its entirety, while read through the prism of collective and individual memory of life under communism, can be more complex, more challenging, and hence more interesting. Regardless of how one chooses to read this memoir, it is clear that the life and works of Nomberg-Przytyk are certainly worthy of our attention. The richness of her life, the choices she made, and the way she chose to narrate her story should reach students of Polish history as well as wider audiences.

The Polish Review