Abstract
This article analyzes the representation of sexual assault perpetrated on Polish women in World War II fiction written by immigrant or ethnic writers. A close reading of five novels, Ruta Sepetys’s Salt to the Sea (2016), Janina Surynowa-Wyczółkowska’s Teresa, Dziecko Nieudane (1961), Eva Mekler’s Sunrise Shows Late (1997), W. S. Kuniczak’s The Thousand Hour Day (1966), and Romain Gary’s A European Education (1960), suggests that writers deploy one of two narrative schemas in the construction of wartime rape, and in each case the storyline pattern significantly influences the function rape scenes perform within the novel. In the plots favoring a third-person point of view, rape scenes, usually just brief episodes, establish homosocial relationships among men while little attention is paid to the victims. On the other hand, in first-person narratives, the accounts of sexual assault may become the driving force of the entire plot.
