In it, Nałkowska calmly related selected stories of Nazi atrocities in Poland and the fates of their victims.

Nałkowska was a member of a special committee for the investigation of Nazi crimes that took place in Poland, where she had learned facts directly from victims and witnesses.

Considered a masterpiece of antifascist world literature, Medallions (written in 1945 and first published in 1946) stands as the culmination of Nalkowska's literary style, a style that the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz once described as "the iron capital of her art and one of the very few exportables in our national literature."

More than mere historical record, Medallions offers the reader startling immediacy, the repetition of an event as it persists in the testimonial present, in the scars on the consciousness and conscience of individuals.Part of the text was published in English in the Introduction to Modern Polish Literature edited by Adam Gillon and Ludwik Krzyżanowski.

A complete translation by Diana Kuprel was published by the Northwestern University Press in 2000.