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

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.

“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...

I was refused because according to them one couldn’t write about the occupation this waythey said I was opening the window so narrowlyjust a sliver could be seenthat I look at the Holocaust with just one eyeand speak it in a whisper

one must write differently about the Holocaustthe window must be thrown wide open and one must shoutnot whisper the way I do

Kwiatkowski’s poems are shouts; I reproduced only the milder ones, in consideration of sensitive readers. Nobody’s head is sawed off here.

He is from Gdansk, where he founded a rock group, Trupa Trupa. He is currently artist-in-residence at Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.

When Kwiatkowski was 9, his grandfather, who had been a prisoner in the Stuthoff concentration camp, returned to the camp for the first time, taking him along, an experience that transformed him.

“I didn’t know what was going on. Later, I felt he gave me one of the most important lessons in my life,” said Kwiatkowski. “A very dark one, but I started to ask myself questions: why people are building gas chambers? Why people are building concentration camps? And they’re doing it on and on and on. It’s a never-ending story, unfortunately. “

We call them “detention facilities” now, and while ICE isn’t killing people en masse, the truth is, we don’t know what’s going on inside those remote facilities, and many Americans don’t want to know. If you haven’t noticed, we live in a country where ethnic groups are routinely demonized — Somalis in Minnesota, immigrants everywhere — and masked government thugs pull people off the street for no reason at all. The bedrock of any Holocaust.

Kwiatkowski calls what he does “memory activism,” the poems, “the main point of my life.”

Along with his wife and children. Kwiatkowski mentions that his wife, who is Jewish — he didn’t know that when they married. “It was a family secret” — put up a mezuzah on the inside of the front door frame of their apartment. So the neighbors wouldn’t see. Because you know how neighbors can be.

most of the townsfolk came to see their murdered neighborssome lay still alive in the pitsGood morning Mr. BrumbergGood morning Mrs. BulkinGood morningGood morning