Weronika Kostyrko. Tancerka i zaglada Historia Poli Nirenskiej. Warsaw: Czerwone i czarne, 2019. 438 pp. $28.99 (paper), ISBN 978-83-66219-09-0.
Reviewed by Joanna Sliwa (Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference))
Published on H-Poland (April, 2020)
Commissioned by Anna Muller (University of Michigan - Dearborn)
How does one tell the story of an elusive character? Why does the story itself matter? Weronika Kostyrko, an accomplished journalist, provides answers to both of these complex questions in her book, Tancerka i Zagłada: Historia Poli Nireńskiej (The dancer and the Holocaust: The story of Pola Nireńska). Apart from her identity as a dancer and wife of the famed Jan Karski, and perhaps aside from the named award endowed by her husband at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Pola Nireńska has not garnered much attention—that is, until Kostyrko undertook the task of writing Nireńska’s biography. Kostyrko painstakingly looked for and weaved in a tapestry of sources to present various angles of Nireńska’s life. Thus, Tancerka i Zagłada is not only a biography but also a transnational history, a series of micro-histories, accounts about places and people, a narrative about the author’s research quest, and more. Kostyrko rescues from oblivion records and facts that illuminate the contexts that shaped the choices, actions, and fate of one individual, and by proxy, the lives of other people who became subjects of the author’s inquiry. It is through the lens of gender that Kostyrko illustrates the tumultuous interwar period, the destruction of the Holocaust, and the efforts to reconstitute and mourn the life that was forever lost.
Composed of eleven chapters and a prologue, Tancerka i Zagłada is organized chronologically and geographically. Two chapters correspond to the key people in Nireńska’s life—her sister, Franka, and her fourth husband, Karski. Several images at the end of the book dovetail visually with their descriptions that Kostyrko penned throughout the book. She traces Nireńska’s and her relatives’ lives, skillfully injecting genealogy into her historical and biographical narrative. Thus, Tancerka i Zagłada is also a history of a family. Yet the focus is on Nireńska and the historical and social forces, as well as on the individuals that framed Nireńska’s identities and influenced her personal and professional trajectories. This is primarily a story of a woman who negotiated diverse identities of a daughter, sister, and later a wife; a friend and a lover; a non-heteronormative female; a student; an artist; and ultimately an entrepreneur. Kostyrko also peels other layers of Nireńska’s identity as a Jew, a Pole, but also a cosmopolitan, an immigrant and a refugee, a target of marginalization and hatred, and a survivor, just to name a few.
As Kostryko stitches together the various elements of Nireńska’s identity, background, and career path, she paints a picture of the milieus that Nireńska was both shaped by and a part of. What emerges from Kostyrko’s research is the history of a particular milieu—of dancers, choreographers, artists, and enterprising individuals—and the networks it forged, maintained, and used, that, in turn, propelled Nireńska into the direction of professional dance and ultimately affected her own fate. Therefore, Tancerka i Zagłada is also a microstudy of the twentieth-century world of dance—of international schools, their diverse student bodies (including the high percentage of young Jewish women), famous teachers, and the controversies that shook that environment.
As Kostyrko shows throughout the book, discrimination and persecution brought on by antisemitism, racism, xenophobia, Nazism and Fascism certainly did not spare the world of dance, and Nireńska experienced the repercussions of all of them. These developments influenced Nireńska’s career, survival, and responses wherever she lived at different times in her life, be it Poland, Germany, Austria, Italy, England, Israel, and the United States. Kostyrko provides the contexts necessary to understand each stage of Nireńska’s life. Some of that information is excessive and it veers off from the main subject of the book—Nireńska. But if Kostyrko describes some events in great detail, others are only sketched. The Holocaust and the persecution and annihilation of Warsaw’s Jews, including Nireńska’s own family, serve as an example. Without tangible information about the fate of Nireńska’s beloved sister, Franka, Kostyrko poses questions and uses personal accounts of others to conjure what could have happened to Franka. Such insertions do not directly relate to the topic. However, they do accentuate the consequences of the destruction that survivors and their relatives grappled with in tracing a loved one’s fate and dealing with trauma. Often, they had to rely on the stories of others to help them understand what happened to their loved ones when the only record of a person’s existence remained a survivor’s memory.
For readers interested in Polish and Polish Jewish studies, Tancerka i Zagłada offers a lens onto daily life in prewar Warsaw and that of Jewish families. It weaves in the struggles and challenges that Jews faced, including persistent antisemitism, harassment, and violence. Kostyrko highlights aspects of politics in interwar Poland that affected the lives of Polish Jews, such as those of Nireńska and her family members. By spotlighting the individuals who touched Nireńska’s life Kostyrko challenges the reader to see the complexities inherent in each of them. For example, Karski’s bravery and persistence to serve as a witness and emissary to inform world leaders about the plight of Jews during the Holocaust is well documented. However, his earlier role in crafting policy to strip Polish Jews of their Polish citizenship that led to the Polenaktion (Polish action), the expulsion of Polish Jews from Greater Germany in October 1938, is not widely known. Kostyrko expounds on that part of his life, too. She also remarks, if only cautiously, on the complex relationship between Nireńska and Karski, which, in itself, is a case study of the process of coming to terms with the consequences of the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland.
Tancerka i Zagłada fits in with the ongoing trend in Polish studies to illuminate the history of women and history through the lens of gender, as well as to elucidate stories about individual women. To construct the description of Nireńska and present the ways her personal story is relevant, Kostyrko embarked on a fascinating research journey. In documenting it, Kostyrko lays bare the tools and resources available to researchers, although at times her descriptions may overwhelm with details. However, Kostyrko’s meticulousness in tracking down even the most obscure source is commendable. Thus, Tancerka i Zagłada also tells the story of a researcher’s craft. The book is a welcome addition to the growing number of works that bring to light the experiences of multidimensional individuals who have been sidelined but through whose lives we gain a more refined understanding of the processes that rattled the past two centuries.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-poland.
Citation:
Joanna Sliwa. Review of Kostyrko, Weronika, Tancerka i zaglada Historia Poli Nirenskiej.
H-Poland, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2020.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54147
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |