The Last Summer in Kraków
€18.50
About this Book
Kraków, summer of 1939. As Europe stands on the brink of war, three seventeen-year-old friends—Tadeusz, Helena, and Stefan—are enjoying their last summer of freedom before adulthood. They spend their days exploring Kraków's winding streets, swimming in the Vistula River, and dreaming about their futures, blissfully unaware that their world is about to shatter.
When news breaks that Germany has invaded Poland, their paths diverge dramatically: Tadeusz joins the resistance, Helena helps her Jewish neighbors find safe passage, and Stefan's family connections lead him into moral compromise. Through their intertwined stories, Wiśniewska creates an intimate portrait of youth, friendship, and courage tested by historical forces beyond their control.
Written with lyrical prose and emotional depth, "The Last Summer in Kraków" is both a coming-of-age tale and an elegy for a lost world. Wiśniewska's novel has touched readers across generations, offering a deeply human perspective on one of history's most pivotal moments through the eyes of those just stepping into adulthood.
Recognition & Acclaim
- Winner, Koret International Book Award for Fiction in Translation
- Named "Best Historical Novel of the Year" by Polish Literary Association
- Selected for the "Europe Reads" program of the European Union
I couldn't put this book down. Wiśniewska has an extraordinary ability to make history feel immediate and personal through her characters. The friendship between Tadeusz, Helena, and Stefan feels so authentic—full of inside jokes, unspoken tensions, and genuine affection—that watching it tested by the war becomes genuinely heartbreaking. The translation is excellent, preserving what I imagine must be the author's poetic style in the original Polish.
What makes this novel stand out among WWII fiction is its focus on Kraków—a city whose wartime experience differs from the more frequently portrayed Warsaw—and its emphasis on the summer before the war. These months, when the characters are poised between childhood and adulthood, peace and conflict, create a powerful dramatic tension. The historical details about pre-war Kraków's multicultural character add depth without ever feeling like a history lesson.
Wiśniewska's prose is undeniably beautiful, and her characters feel like real people you might have known. I particularly appreciated how she depicts the gradual way in which their world changes—there's no single dramatic moment, but rather a series of small shifts that accumulate. My only criticism is that the middle section sometimes loses momentum, but the powerful final chapters more than compensate. A thoughtful, lyrical novel that will stay with you.
From Chapter One
Later, Helena would remember that summer by its sounds: the clip-clop of horses' hooves on cobblestones, the calls of street vendors in the Rynek Główny, the splash of oars in the Vistula, and always, everywhere, music—spilling from open windows, from cafés, from the phonograph at Stefan's house where they spent rainy afternoons. That last summer before everything changed had its own soundtrack, and in the years that followed, certain melodies would stop her mid-step on a street corner, transporting her instantly back to those golden days when their biggest concern had been whether they would be accepted to university.
On this particular morning, the first day of July 1939, the sound was church bells, calling the faithful to early Mass at St. Mary's Basilica. Helena wasn't going to church. Instead, she was hurrying across the market square, her sandals making soft tapping sounds against the ancient stones, heading for their usual meeting place at the base of the Adam Mickiewicz monument. Tadeusz would already be there—he was pathologically punctual, a trait that both annoyed and impressed her—but Stefan would be late, as always.
She spotted Tadeusz exactly where she expected, sitting on the monument steps with a book open on his knees. He didn't notice her approach, absorbed as he was in whatever he was reading. This was so typical that she had to smile. With his dark hair falling across his forehead and his serious expression, he looked like he belonged in a different century—a young scholar from Kraków's medieval university.
"Let me guess," she said, stopping in front of him. "Poetry?"
He looked up, momentarily disoriented, then broke into a smile that transformed his face. "Not everything I read is poetry."
"No? Show me." She held out her hand for the book.
He hesitated, then passed it to her. To her surprise, it wasn't literature at all, but a newspaper—and not a Polish one. The headlines were in German.
"Since when do you read German newspapers?" she asked, frowning slightly.
"Since my father started insisting I pay attention to what's happening across the border." He took the paper back, folding it carefully before tucking it into his bag. "Where's Stefan?"
"Where do you think?" Helena laughed, settling beside him on the sun-warmed steps. "Still in bed, or just now realizing he was supposed to meet us half an hour ago."
Tadeusz shook his head, but he was smiling again. "We should start telling him to arrive an hour before we actually want to meet."
"We've been friends for ten years. If we haven't managed to change him by now, I doubt we ever will."
