The article presents Lublin through the analysis of two literary texts that show the existence of the Jewish population of the city and the destruction and absence of Jews from Lublin. Döblin describes in his travelogue Journey to Poland (1925) the parallel existence of the Jewish and Polish city of Lublin in the 1920’s. Krall documents in her literary reportage Exceptionally long line the extermination of the Jewish community and the suppression of the memory of it in Polish collective memory.
Hanna Krall is an acclaimed journalist and author, whose books were translated into multiple languages. However, relatively little critical attention has been given since her rise to world fame to her early work as a journalist. This article revisits this unjustly neglected part of her biography, when she made her name by reportages portraying the realities of life in Poland in the 1970s (the Edward Gierek's decade) and registering the tensions that led to the political earthquake of 1980 and culminated in the collapse of the communist system in 1989.