The final station
Subtitle: Umschlagplatz
By: Jarosław M. Rymkiewicz ; translated by Nina Taylor.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus, Giroux
Published: 1994
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 327
Subjects: Rymkiewicz, Jarosław Marek.; Jews -- Persecutions -- Poland -- Warsaw.; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) -- Poland -- Warsaw.; World War, 1939-1945 -- Personal narratives, Polish.; World War, 1939-1945 -- Poland -- Warsaw.; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) -- Poland -- Warsaw -- Fiction.; Warsaw (Poland) -- Ethnic relations.
Description: The Final Station records Jaroslaw Rymkiewicz's obsession, as a Christian Pole, with the extermination of the Jews during World War II before the eyes of the Poles and, often, with their collaboration. Rymkiewicz places the Umschlagplatz - the area of the Warsaw ghetto where Jews were gathered for deportation as part of the final solution - at the center of his narrative, because "it happened right here, in the midst of our lives.".

Juxtaposing the past and the present, the personal and the historical, The Final Station includes a reconstruction of the minutest details of genocide (very much like Claude Lanzmann's Shoah) and a fictional account of an I. B. Singer-like summer at a resort near Warsaw where a group of Jewish and Christian friends meet shortly before the war for a last season of tennis, debating, and romance.

In this relentlessly probing narrative, Rymkiewicz examines for the first time in all its complexity the Poles' relationship to the Holocaust.
Notes: Translation of: Umschlagplatz.