BLACK METAPHORS IN WITOLD PILECKI’S REPORT

Abstract

In the paper, the author has analysed the imaginative tools that function in Witold Pilecki’s “Witold’s Report”. First, the figures based on the concept of “beast” and semantically related to it ‘flock of sheep’, ‘herd of sheep’, ‘cow’, ‘beastie’, ‘guinea pig’ and others have been spotlighted. The animals that with the help of appropriate poetic means are predicted to the person who is in the mound of the circumstances of the concentration camp have been outlined. Second, an exemplary paradigm based on the concepts of ‘earth’ and ‘hell’ has been analysed. What happens in the camp is called hell (eg, hell on earth, the world of hell, hell scenes, etc.), and what happens outside the camp is called earth. These images are determined by the realm of religion; the author’s picture of the world, however, is not complete as it lacks a third component — the heavens, the paradise. Instead, there is something like a reality - smoke burning in crematoriums rising into the sky. At the end of the paper, the metaphors observed in Pilecki’s prison language have been spotlighted. The semantics of such metaphorical lexemes and phrases as Muslim is ‘a prisoner who runs away from exhaustion’; sick tourists - ‘typhoid patients taken to Brzezinka crematorium’; disinfestation of life - ‘release the hospital from the sick by killing them’; Canada - ‘valuables and money left over by gas strangled Jews enriched by the Germans and some prisoners’ and others — have been analysed. As long as one lives, he creates metaphors, even in the macabre world of the death camp. “Witold’s Report” is a valuable testimony of Witold Pilecki about the Auschwitz concentration camp, where people who were poisoned by the Nazi ideology found traits that were “worse than worse than animals” and prisoners often looked like animals.