Letters from the mulberry

The Polish writer Gustav Mortine (1891-1963) spent five and a half years in the German concentration camps Sachsenhausen and Dachau. After the liberation, he was in France. There he spent several months, first in Paris, and then in the mountains near Grenoblet, restoring his spiritual and physical forces. One of the ways to leave behind the painful past was the work on the book “Letters from the mulberry”, in which he tried to process his camp memories. The book was written very quickly - already in 1945, its first edition was published in Paris. We can say that it is the fruit of the writer"s psychotherapeutic attempts to heal his soul. This book cannot be called purely artistic, but it is also not strictly documentary. The author deliberately retreats from the coherent, chronological narrative of the time spent in the camp, and builds the text on the principle of instant pictures that grab out individual scenes of camp life from the subconscious. Gustav Mortine in the “mulberry letters” remains true of reliability and realism characteristic of his work, intertwined with lyricism and humor. That is why many of the former prisoners-polers considered his book the best in a series of camp memories