Pest-Hörbuch

A closed city. Ambulances drive at night. Residents are abducted by men in rubber suits and face masks. This is not a science fiction script, but the plot of "Plague," a journalistic account of a smallpox epidemic that broke out in Wrocław when most doctors could barely remember the symptoms of the disease. For two months in 1963, no one was allowed to enter or leave the city, and the vast majority of residents were confined to hastily erected isolation stations. Thanks to the effectiveness of the propaganda and censorship of the time, we still know little about this episode in our contemporary history.

Jerzy Ambroziewicz has written a non-fiction narrative worthy of Norman Mailer, the master of the genre. We feel the growing horror that the book describes. However, this is not just the story of an epidemic in Wrocław; it is also a psychological study of a community facing a threat. The outbreak of the disease changed people and their relationships with one another. The events in Wrocław formed a journalistic version of the plague.