Polish poet turns words of Holocaust victims, perpetrators into shards of 'memory activism'

 

Grzegorz Kwiatkowski 

during the war we laid out bodies like wood
but after the war we laid out wood in the forest
like bodies freshly felled.

     Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is not Jewish, but reads his poetry like an Orthodox Jew praying, bending at the waist, rocking forward and back.

I went with my child to the forest and cried helplessly with him
tears dripped from my eyes and the child wiped them away with his hand
and I so regretted I had brought him into the world

     He’s in a third floor conference room at the University of Chicago, reading to about two dozen people, gathered on Monday morning to hear him.

they didn’t know where to run since it was an open field and they ran in circles
how we laughed
and before we killed them
we even whistled some tunes

     Kwiatkowski is reading — loudly, with little inflection — from his book “Crops,” translated from Polish by Peter Constantine. More a pamphlet than a book: 19 small, hard, stone-like poems over 32 pages.

my father
a decent office worker in the railways
never took part in any of the shootings
he was just doing his job
organizing transports
eastward and westward
north and south
back and forth

     The poems are his, but the words aren’t — he gathered them from taped testimonies, combining victims, perpetrators and bystanders.
     “I didn’t change any of the words,” he says. “But still I’m framing it. I’m choosing the fragments. I’m responsible.”
     I’m here because he sent me “Crops.” I read it in less than 10 minutes, but the book rearranged my brain, providing necessary starkness, a counterpoint that I’ve been missing. Over the years, we’ve seen the Holocaust transformed into entertainment, especially on social media. Once there was one Anne Frank. Now there are 6 million. The Holocaust has been retrofitted into a bracing tale of courage, resistance, and redemption. The Holocaust is not a tale of courage, resistance and redemption. It is an epic of cruelty, obedience and horror.
     Kwiatkowski agrees.
    “Most art about the Holocaust is kitsch,” he says.
     Kwiatkowski gathers words, but doesn’t mince them, which makes him a controversial figure in Poland, where depictions of the Holocaust that don’t relentlessly depict the Poles as either victims or heroes are highly unwelcome. The Polish government once demanded that the Sun-Times take down a column of mine suggesting otherwise and, when the paper refused, we were sued. We won, because this is America. Whether it stays America...

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