A Little Annihilation

Name: A Little Annihilation
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SKU: 9781642860665
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A Memoir

By Anna Janko

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4.4

( 280 ratings, 31 reviews)

Summary

A Little Annihilation recounts the devastating massacre of the village of Sochy in eastern Poland on 1 June 1943, when German soldiers destroyed the community and murdered its residents. Through the eyes of nine-year-old Teresa Ferenc, a survivor who witnessed her family's brutal death, and the reflections of her daughter, author Anna Janko, the memoir explores the profound trauma inflicted by war. The book intertwines a personal mother-daughter dialogue to examine memory, loss, and the enduring impact of violence across generations.
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Format: Paperback / softback

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A Little Annihilation

$34⁹⁹

Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

This memoir will resonate with readers interested in historical biographies, war trauma, and intergenerational memory, as well as those seeking poignant, deeply personal narratives about the human cost of conflict.

In this reflection on second-generation trauma, Anna Janko examines her mother's memories of witnessing her family's murder in 1943 Poland.

Description

June 1, 1943, Eastern Poland.

Within just a few hours, the village of Sochy had ceased to exist. Buildings were burned. Residents shot.

Among the survivors was nine-year-old Teresa Ferenc, who saw her family murdered by German soldiers, and would never forget what she witnessed the day she became an orphan. The horror of that event was etched into her very being and passed on to her daughter, author Anna Janko.

A Little Annihilation bears witness to both the crime and its aftershocks - the trauma visited on the next generation - as revealed in a beautifully scripted and deeply personal mother-daughter dialogue. As she fathoms the full dimension of the tragedy, Janko reflects on memory and loss, the ethics of helplessness, and the lingering effects of war.

'Scenes from the war live on as trauma in the memory of the next generation. A Little Annihilation by Anna Janko is an extraordinarily personal and powerful account of how the worst wartime atrocities affect ordinary people and are seldom recorded in the official histories.' - Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the Man Booker International Prize for Flights

'This is a book about children in war and how we inherit trauma - factual and unflinching, but touching and tender... As with Svetlana Alexievich's reportage, in this book war is shown not only as a tragic episode in history, but as a living memory, which even after many years puts us on our guard as a danger which could recur.' - Lithub

Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

Olga Tokarczuk, Man Booker International Prize winner, praises the book as a powerful personal account revealing how wartime atrocities shape ordinary lives beyond official histories. Lithub highlights the book's unflinching yet tender portrayal of inherited trauma and compares it to the impactful reportage of Svetlana Alexievich, emphasising war as a living memory that warns of future dangers.

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781642860665

Publisher: World Editions

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 02 June 2020

Country: United States

Imprint: World Editions

Illustration: black & white photographs

Contributors:

Translated by Philip Boehm

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Width: 139.0mm

Height: 215.0mm

Weight: 250g

Pages: 216

Collections

Anna Janko Biography & Memoir Non-Fiction

About the Author

ANNA JANKO is one of the best-known contemporary Polish writers. A poet and literary critic, Janko has twice been nominated for the Nike Literary Prize (2001, 2013). She has also been nominated for the Angelus Central European Literature Award in 2008 and again in 2016, where A Little Annihilation was a finalist. She has won multiple awards and literary prizes including the City of Gdask Book of the Year (1981) and the Dresden Independent Writers' Society Prize (1993) for her entire poetic oeuvre. A film based on A Little Annihilation, under the title A Minor Genocide, was released in 2017. It won major prizes at international film competitions in New York and Calcutta and received the Humanitarian Award in 2019.

PHILIP BOEHM is an American playwright, theater director, and literary translator based in Houston, Texas. His career has zigzagged across languages, borders, and cultural divides. He studied at the State Academy of Theater in Warsaw, Poland, and has directed extensively on both sides of the Atlantic. He has translated more than thirty novels and plays, mostly by German and Polish writers including Herta Mller, Franz Kafka, and Hanna Krall. For this work he has received numerous awards, including fellowships from the NEA and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.