In her journal written in times of war Nałkowska faces the awareness of the ultimate threat and the thoughts regarding own death:
It has still continued, it has repeated over and over again – similar days go by: raids and then executions in the city streets. Or there – this I know. I think that I will be myself at that time, that I will never stop being myself. I think of it as if it was a discovery. When I walk where I don’t want to, when I am forced to leave my makeshift bed, my books and my letter files behind, and to do what seems so difficult when one is still surrounded by them – till the very last moment, however, I will be left with myself, who will be with me. And in this sense, I will remain myself. Because what is really important in the final moments are the morale and the peace that I am so certain of, as well as a total restraint of despair – because there will be no fear. Fear will be turned around; frozen; fear will be exactly that: resilience and strength. I can achieve it all if I am still myself. – That’s what I believe and that’s how I settle my own matters. Yet, it does not settle the matters of the others: those young ones whose lives are unfulfilled. (December 14, 1943)
In the context of the excerpt quoted above, the words that Nałkowska noted down in the midst of war atrocities are most touching:
The desire to get out of this approaching hell would seem so compelling. Yet, I won’t leave my fate, which is here and which is astonishing. (April 20, 1944)
The wide spectrum of the issues discussed in the diary also comprise the area of metaphysics, which Nałkowska approaches with her characteristic rationalism:
A religious experience is not different from what can be called an experience of existence or experience of the unity of being. It involves that same shocking admiration that one is part of the world and that one is tied with it through the identity of a being. One may experience this state as an ecstasy of joy and triumph that one is not alone in the huge vacuum of the universe. Still, one can also experience it in quite a common manner as an ecstasy and humbleness in view of the infinity of the matter. In both cases, it is the affirmation of the unity with the world. Paying tribute to the omnipotence of God in a great happiness of humbleness is just one of the texts conveying this state. Thus, also as a result of my dispute with Halinka, I tend to think now that the question whether “the soul is or isn’t immortal” is unnecessary, it comes from the field of a wrong text. Immortality and infinity are “in this life” with all their suffering and the complete elation of experiencing them. Immortality is consumed throughout life, it is totally exploited, drained to the last drop. – I think that everything is contained and fulfilled within one’s life. I feel a dislike for immortality as revival of an individual life. The entire scenario of immortality – resurrection, metempsychosis, eternal life – has always been the bad unnecessary fourth act of the excruciating life drama. A deadly sin against the unity of time and place.
On the pages of her post-war diary written in the writer’s final days, excellent descriptions of Warsaw, destroyed but pulsating with a new energy, can be found. As there were no other means of public transport, Nałkowska would move around the capital in a crowded truck (imagine the elegant Mrs. Zofia wearing impeccable make-up and hairdo stuck among the crowd on the platform) observing the city growing out of ruins. Luxurious stores would mushroomed in between destroyed buildings. Nałkowska’s favourite café, the sophisticated Kongo, was also located among the ruins. Such flash pictures are drawn by the writer with a great suggestiveness and a passion worth of a reporter.
The increasingly laconic notes from the writer’s final years are filled with comments on old age, whose directness, gravity and lack of sentimentalism are unrivalled:
I look like the old woman that I am. And realizing that old age is a shame, a disability; that an old age disqualifies; and keeping up appearances, a hairdo, a face “made-up” in spite of anything, neat clothes make it worse, make it the more visible. That’s it. (Polanica, September 1, 1946)
In the final period of the occupation, the advance payments received from Zbigniew Mitzner opened up the possibilities for Nałkowska of working on Bonds of Life, the novel she had started before the outbreak of war. On its pages, the writer expressed her leftist views and criticized the Polish pre-war reality. In the opinion of the writer herself, it is a novel about an epoch in which “the old departed from themselves, while the young ones rapidly lost their heads”. Tadeusz Breza wrote that whereas Nałkowska’s attitude towards the recently closed past of the pre-war period as well as the establishment and elites was already cool in Teresa Hennert and The Frontier, in Bonds of Life it was freezing cold. Breza was greatly impressed by the fist part of the novel: