Beautifully translated. . . . Your hometown is about to be annihilated. Szewc's answer to these questions is an elegiac meditation that reconstructs individual moments in the life of his hometown, razed by Nazis years before his birth in 1961. The tastes, smells, and mundane activities of an ordinary day in a small eastern Polish town are preserved here for posterity. A single day is minutely and lovingly resurrected, and all of its lost opportunities and inconsequential details savored.
All life here is cherished and suspended, innocent and ignorant of the passage of time.
To see, he says, to remember, to record scrupulously, to follow what disappears, not to miss anything. The bright morning, the sweet lazy afternoon, the night that comes on to signify all nights and the darkest nights to come. He captures all of this, amazing to do it in a hundred pages or so. This homage is neither nostalgic nor anecdotal. It is, if you will, a warning that the ravages of history can occur now and here.