Helena Janeczek is a writer whose work delves into the forgotten narratives and marginalized voices within history. Her writing often carries a deeply autobiographical resonance, exploring themes of identity, memory, and the weight of the past. She crafts prose that is both evocative and insightful, bringing to life poignant human experiences against significant historical backdrops. Janeczek's distinctive literary approach compels readers to confront the complexities of history and the enduring impact of individual lives.
Focusing on the life of Gerda Taro, this biographical novel explores the journey of a pioneering German Jewish war photographer and antifascist. It highlights her significant contributions to photojournalism during the Spanish Civil War, where she became the first woman to die on the frontline while documenting the conflict. The narrative delves into her courage, passion for truth, and the challenges she faced as a female journalist in a male-dominated field.
Winner of the Strega Prize Gerda Taro, this biographical novel is based on the true story of Gerda Taro, a German Jewish war photographer, antifascist, and the first woman photojournalist to have died while covering the frontline in the Spanish Civil War.
This novel hinges on the battle of Monte Cassino, Italy, in World War II, covering the international contingents and their contribution to that victory. The four month long battle at Monte Cassino in southern Italy was one of the bloodiest in World War II. In this highly original novel, Janeczek retells that 1944 battle from the point of view of the Maori, Gurkha, Polish, North African, small-town American and other Allied foot soldiers who fought and died under German fire near that 6th century Benedictine abbey. Twined through the battle is another story, a memory of the drowned and the saved in Janeczek's own family in wartime Eastern Europe, where Jews who did not go to Nazi death camps went to Soviet gulag camps, and sometimes survived, and even went on to fight at Monte Cassino. A powerful reflection on all the ways that rights can be taken from us. "Helena Janeczek's novel is this: a tattoo etched on the skin, and not painlessly. A vast design that brings together threads from all the various lives that converged in that legendary battle. The beauty of her tale lies in its structure, the way opposites converge: the chaos of battle and the silence of the defeated, ordinariness and the heroism of the powerless, carefully guarded memory and impetuous youth, the past perpetually intertwined with the present." Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah
