Rediscovering Piotr Rawicz’s Holocaust novel 'Blood from the Sky'

The UK launch of 'A sky of blood and ashes: Piotr Rawicz and the loneliness of the witness'.

The Wiener Library is pleased to be hosting the UK launch of a new book co-edited by Anny Dayan Rosenman and Fransiska Louwagie. 'Un ciel de sang et de cendres: Piotr Rawicz et la solitude du témoin' ('A sky of blood and ashes: Piotr Rawicz and the loneliness of the witness') is a study of Ukrainian-French Holocaust survivor Piotr Rawicz and his novel 'Le sang du ciel' (translated as 'Blood from the Sky').

Piotr Rawicz was a Jewish-Ukrainian Holocaust survivor who managed to conceal his Jewishness from his Nazi persecutors and survived the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Leitmeritz assuming a non-Jewish identity. Rawicz's novel relates the destruction of Eastern European Judaism and confronts us with the extreme isolation of the main character as he too attempts to hide his Jewishness and struggles with the moral compromises that survival entails. 'Blood from the Sky' achieved immediate literary success but gradually fell into obscurity, receiving little critical attention for a long time. Addressing this lack, the new book-length study co-edited by Anny Dayan Rosenman and Fransiska Louwagie (Paris, 2013) includes a range of contributions analyzing this exceptional novel from the perspective of different academic disciplines.

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