Polish Reportage

The follow up to Łazarewicz's harrowing Żeby Nie Było Śladów (Leave No Trace) depicting the case of the political murder of Grzegorz Przemyk-which earned Łazarewicz the Nike Literary Award in 2017-the Gorgonowa Case focuses on the case of Rita Gorgonowa, a cause célèbre of the interwar period in Poland. Gorgonowa, a governess having an affair with her employer, was accused of brutally murdering his daughter, the 17-year-old Lusia on New Year's Eve in 1931. Despite her claims of innocence, Gorgonowa was declared Poland's ultimate villain, and eventually convicted. But questions remain about this case-the most notorious murder trial of the Second Polish Republic-along with questions about what exactly happened to Gorgonowa post-World War II. Łazarewicz revisits the crime with a contemporary lens and recreates the furor and celebrity revolving around this murder.

In 1958, Michel Foucault arrived in Poland to work on his thesis-a work that eventually came to be published as The History of Madness. While he was there, he became involved with a number of members of the gay community, including a certain "Jurek," who eventually led the secret police directly to Foucault's hotel room, causing his subsequent exit from Poland. That boy's motivations and true identity were hidden among secret police documents for decades, until Remigiusz Ryziński stumbled upon the right report and uncovered the truth about the whole situation.

Equipped with the sensitivity known from his earlier reportages, in Roosters Crow, Dogs Whine, Wojciech Tochman addresses people with mental illnesses in Cambodia who are imprisoned in kennels, chained up, and locked in cells-often by their own families, who are desperate and at a loss for what to do. Doctors from the Transcultural Psychosocial Organization, in turn, face a great challenge in helping these people because there are only fifty psychiatrists in a country of sixteen million people. Roosters Crow, Dogs Whine approaches both the doctors and their patients with empathy, and also highlights the country's other social problems, such as slave labor or the lack of sensitivity in society. A thematic continuation of Polish journalist Tochman's self-described "dark triptych" about societies affected by genocides, Roosters Crow, Dogs Whine presents a portrait of a Cambodia in which the memory of the Khmer Rouge terror is still alive, where the nation is suffering from a trauma referred to as baksbat, or "broken courage syndrome."