The Battle of Literature. The world before us did not exist/Katarzyna Surmiak-Domańska/Kamil Bałuk/PJM

You don't have to experience war to live with its consequences. It is enough to grow up in the house of those who remember her. This is where war stays the longest — in family stories, in silences, in the way we love, fear, raise children, and imagine the world.

People who survived World War II returned to life without language to tell their own suffering and without psychological support. They were to start families, rebuild houses, cities, state and everyday life. No one taught them how to rebuild themselves. What they did not manage to assimilate and name, they often passed on to children and grandchildren. Why do symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder occur much more frequently in Poland than in most European countries? Why do almost one in five Polish women and one in five Poles experience it? What is left in us of those who survived the occupation, camps, deportations, Volyn, Siberia, the Warsaw Uprising or the “Vistula” campaign? And how does this legacy work in us to this day?

Katarzyna Surmiak-Domańska — a reporter associated with Gazeta Wyborcza for many years. She cooperates as a tutor and lecturer with the Polish School of Reportage at the Institute of Reportage. A novelist by education. The author of, among others, the reporter's story “Mokradełko”, which was included in the final of the Nike Literary Award 2013 and was staged at the Teatr Nowy in Poznań in a production by Mikołaj Grabowski. In 2016, she was nominated again for the Nike Award for the “Ku Klux Klan. Love lives here.” The book was also nominated for the Beata Pawlak Prize and the Ryszard Kapuściński Prize. In 2018, she published a biographical report “Kieślowski. Close-up”, which earned her the Teresa Torańska “Newsweek” Award and was included in the final of the Upper Silesian Juliusz Literary Award. Her book “Cistka” received the Wawrzyn — Warmia and Mazury Literary Award, the Kazimierz Moczarski Youth Clubs Historical Award, was included in the final of the ANGELUS Central European Literary Prize and the final of the Grand Press — Reporter Book of the Year 2022 competition and received a nomination for the Beata Pawlak Prize. She was also recognized by “Books. Magazine to Read” for the best book of 2021.