In the Shadow of the Mechanised Apocalypse: Warsaw 1946

By Zulawski Marek and Marek Zulawski

In May 1946, the artist Marek Zulawski returned to his homeland of Poland.

During his many years away, his former home city had been devastated by the Nazi Germans in retaliation for the Warsaw Uprising.

He had been in London when World War II broke out in 1939. He remained there, contributing to the war effort through designing posters and broadcast journalism with BBC Radio's Polish section.

When he came back for an exhibition of his work at the National Museum in Warsaw, he brought his notepad and sketchbook. The resulting notes and drawings went into his autobiography 'Study for a Self-Portrait' published decades later in Polish.

Here for the first time in English is this unique record of his trip. A confrontation with an almost unrecognisable place ravaged by unspeakable horrors that was somehow returning to a semblance of normality.

"Warsaw is a reanimated ruin, a corpse that has refused to stay in its grave, opened its empty eye sockets, heaved up its rotten bones, and spread out those fingers twisted by an executioner's pliers. It is filled with unbelievable energy, like Frankenstein's monster. Its crowds are enormously active, with no trace of apathy and everything done with a trot. Trams and trolleybuses are taken by storm at every stop. Whoever is strongest, wins. The bars, cafes and restaurants set up within the concrete carcasses of buildings are always full. Nobody seems to notice the weakened ceilings hanging menacingly above them. It’s as though everybody has agreed to pretend that Warsaw still exists and this new colossal fiction has become more powerful than reality."

For more about Marek Zulawski, visit TranslatingMarek.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Translating Marek
• Release date: Nov 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781915845009

Book preview

Dear Reader,

This e-book is the opening part of Study for a Self-Portrait, an autobiography by my father, Marek Zulawski. Marek was a Polish artist who spent the majority of his life in London.

The title ‘In the Shadow of the Mechanised Apocalypse’ was taken from his own translation created for a magazine in 1980. That version was full of amendments and errors so, for my own translation, I kept to the original text as written in 1946. 

Several drawings included here have never been published before.

For more extracts from his memoirs, artwork, interviews and more, visit TranslatingMarek.com.

- Adam Zulawski, November 2022

In the Shadow of the

Mechanised Apocalypse:

Warsaw 1946

by

Marek Zulawski

Translated by

Adam Zulawski

- - -

Copyright © 2022 Adam Zulawski

ISBN: 978-1-915845-00-9

All Rights Reserved

TranslatingMarek.com

Marek Zulawski, Warsaw, the Old Town, 1946

May 1946.

The American truck rumbles angrily over the potholes.

In we go, says somebody before falling silent.

A fellow traveller tells me to lean out from under the truck’s canvas. There’s a large hush and all we can hear is the engine whirring. In front of us is the odd house, charred and deserted amongst broken fences, dead trees with truncated boughs, and then suddenly we’re taking in the black walls of Wola.

The tall skeletons of tenement houses rush by in broken intervals, their jagged silhouettes flowing into the distance to form mountain-like ridges. The streets are full of the chatter of carts, trolleys, old peasant women with baskets. People come in and out of roasted battered gates, disappearing down pathways trodden out of hillocks of rubble, the remnants of the guts of houses, and reappearing again from other holes and gaps. There is brisk trade from makeshift broken plank and brick shanties, while ruins tower perilously above them, like ancient aqueducts. The roadways, which have been cleared of debris, form the only rational element of the whole scene.

A tram leans out from behind a street corner, ringing furiously, before trundling into some sort of canyon. It’s completely plastered with people hanging onto every side and growls damnation under its heavy load. Some boys in picturesque