Note: This is a crosspost from my personal blog.

The following are a few quotes that stood out to me in Chapter Four of The Rainbow.

Yes, to see the last German on the gallows, to see them working until they dropped.

But what good would that do her? Others might be satisfied, but her heart would never know peace. No amount of blood, no length of time, no revenge could wash away her memories. They would remain festering at her heart forever.

I think the description of death dancing with the snowflakes perfectly fits Anton Chekhov’s famous advice: “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” Wanda Wasilewska doesn’t just “tell” us that the village is under siege; she “shows” us the atmosphere through a terrifying, personified landscape.

I. The Personification of the End

Death was dancing among the snowflakes on the road, flying with the storm over the rooftops, creeping like a white ghost through cracks and crannies, tousling the thatched roofs, and mercilessly buffeting the last linden trees not yet felled by German axes, covering the earth with its mighty wings.

Death, a German Death, was flying over the village, laughing, groaning, and squealing in the wind.

Notice how she avoids the abstract. Death isn’t a concept here; it has a voice—it “laughs” and “squeals.” It has a physical presence that “creeps” through the very cracks of the houses. By tethering the idea of mortality to the blizzard, she makes the reader feel the literal chill of the occupation.

II. The Material Reality of the Grain

Wasilewska applies the same “show, don’t tell” mastery to the politics of survival. She doesn’t just say “giving the Germans food is bad.” She describes the physical consequences:

But in the earth, with the grain hidden from German eyes, lay the secret golden heart of Mother Russia. What lay there, entrusted by the earth to peasant hands, was the harvest, the flower of this earth, and its heavy golden fruit. To give up the grain meant giving the German Army bread. To give up the grain meant freeding the Fritzes, filling their hungry bellies, warming their rotting, frostbitten bodies. To give the Fritz bread meant striking a blow at the very hearts of those who in the frost, snow-storm, and blizzard were fighting the enemy with selfless heroism. To give the Germans bread meant betraying the land to the enemy, playing traitor to their own kin, and acknowledging the Germans to be masters of the fruitful Ukrainian earth and lords of the Ukraine.

By focusing on the “rotting, frostbitten bodies” of the enemy and the “heavy golden fruit” of the earth, she turns the act of hiding grain into a high-stakes tactical move. The grain isn’t just food—it is the “secret golden heart” of the resistance.