The following are editor’s notes that appeared in or alongside English translations of the named books and stories. Please read them and decide whether they were published by the People’s Republic of Poland or by Western publishers.

Jerzy Andrzejewski The Inquisitors

Written and first published in Communist Poland, this novel is a powerful indictment of all totalitarian systems. Ostensibly it is a historical novel set in fifteenth-century Spain, at the height of the Inquisition terror, but coming from an author who has witnessed at first hand both Nazi and Communist terror, it has obvious contemporary significance. There is no doubt that it is the most significant novel to come from the Communist world since Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago. 

Jerzy Andrzejewski “Roll Call” 

The writer’s ideology has undergone various transfigurations. The psychologizing and gloomy atmosphere of the Heart’s Order was followed by a more objective realism  fully evident in Ashes and Diamonds.

Jerzy Andrzejewski Ashes and Diamonds

Jerzy Andrzejewski’s political thriller vividly describes Communist bureaucrats, old Resistance fighters, black marketeers, servants, and fading aristocrats as they converge on the town's chief hotel – a microcosm of an uprooted world. Michael, a young soldier anxious to return to civilian life yet loyal to his ex-officers of the Nazi Resistance, accepts one last order: to kill the local Communist secretary, a hard but compassionate man of principle. 

Jerzy Andrzejewski “The Sons” 

After the war he won a leading position in contemporary Polish literature with his collection of stories Noc (Night – 1945) and above all, with the novel Ashes and Diamonds – 1948), in which latter he expressed a profound concern for the fate of the post-war generation of youth and for the moral state of Polish society after the Nazi occupation. Shortly thereafter the great moral conflicts in Andrzejewski’s works made way for political passions; the writer conducted polemics with the distortion in political life of which he was a keen observer. At that time he created grotesque parables of the pamphleteering, satirical type, stories about the destructive force of the banal.