On October 4^th, 2010 at 6 pm in the Warsaw Rising Museum will take place a discussion entitled “The Holocaust – an Inconvenient Truth”. Its participants will beYannick Haenel, Bruno Tessarech and Andrzej Kunert. The meeting will be moderated by Remigiusz Grzela. The discussion is organized by Wydawnictwo Literackie, Oficyna Literacka Noir sur Blanc, the Warsaw Rising Museum and the French Institute in Warsaw.

Yannick Haenel is the author of a book arousing big controversy, entitled “Jan Karski. A Novel”. Its central figure is the legendary courier of the Polish underground during the Second World War, Righteous Among the Nations (he was awarded with the title in 1982), who from January 1940 had been participating in courier missions of the underground Polish authorities and many times appealed to the representatives of the Allied authorities, asking them to save the Jews.

In his book devoted to Karski the author assumes that fiction can help to present the truth effectively. Heanel depicts a lonely Karski, whose testimony has not been considered by the Allies with due attention. In the last part of the book, which arouses the biggest controversy, appears a fictious monologue of Jan Karski, in which Roosevelt is presented as completely indifferent to the account and to the news about extermination camps. While Karski presents him the terrible situation, the president of the United States avidly examines the legs of his stenotypist. Yannick Haenel believes that where direct experience is not enough, literature becomes necessary.

Bruno Tessarech is the author of the book „The Guards” in which he presented people who saved Jews during the Second World War. Among others, he describes the figure of Gustav Schroeder who transported hundreds of Jewish refugees on the ship “Saint Louis”. He put into numerous ports, where no one met him. Tessarech, similarly to Haenel, combines historical facts with literary fiction.

This method of combining reality with fiction and literature with history still arouses big controversy. Undoubtedly, during the meeting Haenel and Tessarech will try to prove to their audience that the practice they have chosen is both efficient and justified.