Mother and Daughter in the Face of the Wartime Apocalypse In the Light of Anna Janko’s Book a Little Annihilation: A Memoir – Trauma, Memory and Post-memory

Abstract

The article refers to the book by Anna Janko A Little Annihilation: A Memoir (Mała Zagłada) and its aim is to present how tragic events, although not experienced personally, affect the life of the next generation after directly experienced trauma. The author’s mother, as a child, was one of the few who survived the war massacre in the village Sochy and struggles all her life with the remembered cruelty of those events. Her daughter knows the war only from her mother’s storytelling, through the intergenerational memory message, but she experiences similar syndromes to her mother. The literary narrative turns out to be a remedy for the experienced trauma of both generations – directly suffered by the war and the post-memory generation. By reporting on her mother’s fate, Janko puts herself in the position of a descendant of the survivors, but also of a victim who must face with this inherited trauma. Moreover, as the social memory of the war is currently dominated by other narratives, Anna Janko’s book takes the mentioned war events out of the margins of social memory.

Keywords

• memory
• trauma
• post-memory
• intergenerational message
• annihilation