Danuta Hinc

"He was caught somewhere between his mother's last kiss and the first kiss he would give his child, between the war that was and would be." — Jonathan Safran Foer

During the Cold War, my mother would travel from Gdańsk, Poland, to East Berlin twice a year to shop for items that were unavailable back at home; school supplies, clothes, and food were on her usual list. But when I was seven, she bought for my sister and me one of the rarest items we knew at that age—camisoles. They were white, ...

Danuta Hinc’s essays and short fiction have appeared most recently in the Literary Hub, Washingtonian Magazine, Popula, The Brick House, Consequence Magazine, The Word Riot, among others. She holds an M.A. in Philology from Gdansk University in Poland. She completed three years of postgraduate studies at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 2014 she received the Barry Hannah Merit Scholarship in Fiction from Bennington College where in 2016 she earned her M.F.A. in fiction.

The woman who used to be the girl in the triptych mirror is standing in her bedroom looking at her husband’s sleep apnea machine placed on the floor next to the bed. It’s the middle of summer. A four-armed fan below the cathedral ceiling, muted and drowsy, is crawling through the hot air. Late afternoon light is coming from between the blinds, leaving a shadow ladder on the rug. Outside, a bumblebee is bumping against the glass, coming back from the same starting point as if on a string. She ...

Congratulations to Danuta Hinc who received the Barry Hannah Merit Scholarship in Fiction to attend the MFA in Writing Program at Bennington College, Vermont.

How does a scholarly boy from an affluent Egyptian family grow up to be a terrorist? Danuta Hinc’s new novel, To Kill the Other, imagines the story of the gradual radicalization of a young man in the years leading up to the attack on the World Trade Center in New York. Through his travels in Egypt, Israel, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the young man, Taher, is molded by the people he meets and the things he sees, experiences which lead him down the dark path to his own destruction. Danuta Hinc spoke with Signal producer Lisa Morgan about her journey inside the mind of a killer. ~ Aaron Henkin, 88.1 FM Your NPR News Station

I grew up in communist Poland, and I knew few people who didn’t dream of leaving. I was one of them, and I emigrated as soon as the ban on traveling to the West was lifted. The place we all wanted to live was the United States of America, the greatest country in the world. There were many reasons why America was the best, and after living here for a quarter of a century, I still remember some of them.
The first was red socks. I reca...

Even after I became a naturalized citizen, it took me several years before I stopped having nightmares about being back in communist Poland with no possibility of leaving and returning to the States. I would wake up with feelings of deep dread and hopelessness, and it would take me hours before my assaulted mind could ease into accepting that “it was only a dream.” Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe were already free of communism, which had collapsed in 1989, but my mind was not. One part ...

They cut into the ocean in a perfectly perpendicular line. Their color changes depending on how much of the rock is submerged in water in low or high tides and how much sunlight reflects on their smooth surface, but it is always a version of black. They disappear when the moon brings the ocean far inland. In low tides more of them appear, covered in green moss that dries quickly in the summer sun. No one knows how much more is underground, perhaps a whole mountain, and that unknown brings me ...

We must tell our children about how this evil was allowed to happen—because so many people succumbed to their darkest instincts; because so many others stood silent. But let us also tell our children about the Righteous among the Nations. Among them was Jan Karski—a young Polish Catholic—who witnessed Jews being put on cattle cars, who saw the killings, and who told the truth, all the way to President Roosevelt himself.
President Barack Obama, announcing Jan Karski’s posthumous Presidential M...

"Throughout the novel, Hinc depicts the power of the belief in “the other,” and how our minds are able to construct narratives that match our beliefs more closely than they do reality."

What eventually came of that rush of tangled emotions and questions, some 10 years later, is Hinc’s book, “To Kill the Other.” It’s a fictional story of a boy who grows up to become a terrorist. It’s not about al-Qaeda; it’s not about ideology. It’s about the choices human beings make.

As I was reading about the group of women in Handmaid’s Tale red robes and white bonnets who staged a pro-choice protest in the Texas senate this week on Monday, March 20th, I was thinking about the power of image. The group of women—channeling the characters in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian 1985 novel who were forced by the government to bread—sat silently in the senate gallery while the anti-abortion bills were passed. In videos posted on Instagram, we see them marching in the senate’s hallwa...

The year I was eligible to vote for the first time, I announced to my parents that I would tell the communist officials at the voting place that I know it is all a sham. This is what eighteen-year-olds do, they announce their bravery, while the elders look at them with fear and pride. When I left the house that day, I carried myself with certainty and resolve suitable for someone who was about to change the world.
Everyone knew that elections in communist Poland were elections in name only, b...

In first grade, at seven years of age, I started catechism classes like everyone else in my school. A part of me was excited about it, and a part of me was scared. Today I know that the part of me that was scared was precisely responsible for my excitement, kind of like when we watch horror movies.

Let’s start from the beginning. It happened in the 70s, in communist Poland. Catechism classes were held in a presbytery next to the Catholic Parish of the Assumption of the Bless...

Growing up in communist Poland, in a family opposed to the regime, was like watching and discussing open wounds with the understanding that nothing could be changed, but that opposition was necessary.