Maciej Zaremba Bielawski was born in 1951 in Poznań. He grew up in a family that for years fed him an aristocratic legend — an ancestor was said to have fought at Grunwald, and a portrait of a Piast knight hung on the wall. When he was seventeen, as the antisemitic purges of March 1968 were under way, his mother said to him: “We are leaving. I am Jewish.” That was the first of many family secrets he would uncover over the following decades. Today he is one of Sweden’s most respected journalists and reporters, a long-time contributor to Dagens Nyheter.

The House with Two Towers is simultaneously a family saga and an investigative reportage in which the author reconstructs the lives of his parents — two people marked by the Holocaust who after the war built a new life without telling their children where they had come from. His father, Stanisław Zaremba, was a distinguished mathematician; his mother — a woman who spent her whole life concealing her Jewish origins. Their story is interwoven with the history of Poland and Sweden in the twentieth century: with the Shoah, emigration, acculturation, and that particular silence which survivors pass on to their children as inheritance.

The author leads the reader through archival documents, letters, photographs, and conversations with living witnesses. He reconstructs his family’s history with the scrupulousness of a historian and the sensitivity of a son — knowing that in reconstructing his parents’ past he is simultaneously reconstructing himself. The book is also an analysis of the mechanism of assimilation: how a Jewish family in the Poland of the 1950s and 1960s tried to become invisible, how it erased the traces of its own identity in order to survive.

The title refers to the house with two towers that appears in a family portrait — a symbol of something that existed before the hiding began. Zaremba writes of this not with bitterness but with an effort at understanding: how great historical violence shapes small, private lives for generations.