For many years, Jerzy Ficowski bore within himself the pain of an ‘incapacitated onlooker’. He spent decades searching for the language and form that would lend expression to feelings from the time of the Holocaust. In poems from the cycle Odczytanie popiołów (‘Reading the Ashes’)-about which it is difficult to write because they are so stark, so undiluted, so silent-the author’s path is powerfully present, patiently pervading the words like a ripening of fruit. This, too, is most interesting-a series of facts arising from a youthful empathy for the suffering of others; an empathy that, imperceptibly, becomes a lifetime commitment.
How was it for that boy from the time he saw little Raizl that day on Smolna Street, nestled in a corner between the cigarette booth and the wall of an apartment building, shivering with cold? How was the poet born after the Holocaust, a time when poetry was doomed to impossibility?
first attempts and glimmers
The first poem dedicated to the tragedy of the Jews appeared during the occupation and was preserved in the author’s archive. He himself says of it: ‘[It is] not a good poem, but it arose from a kind of need and a kind of inability-from not being reconciled to what was happening and from powerlessness to oppose it.’1
In 1947 Ficowski published a moving article entitled ‘Dzieci’ (‘Children’) in the Kraków periodical Naprzód. In it, he describes the emotions of two boys-himself and his friend Zbyszek Manys´. Travelling the same route to school (the streets of Marsza≥kowska, Aleje Jerozolimskie, Smolna), they passed Jewish children begging: She was crying. Those who have only seen a child crying over a lost doll cannot know HOW she was crying. The despair exceeded the capacity of her little child’s body. She pressed her wounded little hands onto the nestled head of her little brother, sharing with him the pain that she could not bear. When she saw a German among the passers-by, she hid her brother from view and covered her face with her palms. Behind the girl, who was shivering from cold, a fruit-shop display was piled with heaps of apples, biscuits, and candy, which were rapidly disappearing in the pre-holiday shopping.
Here, for the first time, he describes this little girl who will be remembered for ever. He includes a photograph of her as well. Years later, in Odczytanie popiołów, a poem would appear with the title ‘Six-Year-Old from the Ghetto, Begging on Smolna Street’.
In his 1948 debut volume, Ołowiani żołnierze (‘Toy Soldiers’), Ficowski included a poem entitled ‘Exodus 1947’. This poem was rather unusual for those times and was pioneering in its sympathy for the tragic fate of the Jews during and after the war-for their homeless wandering and isolation, for their quest for the ‘Promised Land’ on ships roaming the seas: ‘The gaze of the hungry is dulled by injustice. | And it is growing. It is a tide. | And a blind wave pounds the calm, coastal dreams of sated cities.’ Nor did he pass over in silence the tragic exodus of the Jews in 1968; his poem entitled ‘Dworzec Gdański 1968’ (‘Gdańsk Station 1968’), dedicated to the memory of Arnold Słucki, is evidence of this.
The loneliness of the Jewish tragedy during the Warsaw ghetto uprising and the gulf dividing the Jews from the residents of the ‘Aryan’ side, who lived in direct proximity to them, are recalled in a poem called ‘Wielki Tydzien' (‘Holy Week’) in the 1952 volume Zwierzenia (‘Confessions’): ‘Observed from a distance-from the void | the mourners flying in a cloud.’ There is an echo here of Czesław Miłosz’s ‘Campo di Fiori’; the fragment of this poem about the wind coming from the burning buildings and blowing at the dresses of the girls on the carousel serves as the motto for the poem ‘Opłakiwanie’ (‘Lament’) from Odczytanie popiołów. There is also talk here of the continuity between the ‘band of youths’ who carried out pogroms in pre-war Poland, bearing gifts ‘like the Magi: | a rock in the window, a stick to the head’, and the fascism that appeared together with the Hitlerites during the war: ‘Fascists of another language walked | on the trail of our past Magi.’
The poem was received enthusiastically by Julian Tuwim, to whom it was dedicated. In a letter, Tuwim thanked the author not only in his own name, but also in the sadly forgotten name of the poem’s heroes. Jerzy Ficowski himself has a harsh opinion of this work: ‘This is an honest poem from my point of view, but somehow a bit puffed up, with a few too many drums and drummers, somehow . . . not in my voice.’
The essential difficulty that he faced in the writing of his poems was not a question of the subject matter or his honesty, but a question of the voice itself; for if he could not find his own tone, he would sound ‘dishonest’ on every subject: For many years I could not find the language to express this tragedy and everything that I feel in connection with it. Time passed and I did not know whether words would ever come to me that were not offensive to the cause that I wanted to serve-words that would contain within themselves what was most essential, and at the same time remember the truth that one should be silent when standing at a grave; that is, words that would bear with them the quality of silence, respecting that about which they were silent.
The precursors to poetic language, which he had sought intuitively, appeared at the very beginnings of his output. He perceived this clearly from today’s perspective: Those were the moments, literally flashes. In Toy Soldiers, for example, there’s a poem called ‘Wiosna’ (‘Springtime’). It ends like this: ‘too painfully much of the air left by the dead’. And so, for that period in my writing, this formulation-though stylistically no extravagance, represents a certain leaning beyond the norm of accepted writing, a trace of the search for the language of expression that I would find much later. But something was beginning. Even in Toy Soldiers, something shines through, something that would die out later anyway and which would not appear in a more promising way for a long time.
“letter to Marc Chagall”
The turning point in the poet’s work came in the writing of his poem ‘List do Marc Chagalla’ (‘Letter to Marc Chagall’). This poem might not have taken its present form if not for the book Dzieci oskarz.aja˛, a collection of transcripts of accounts by children rescued from the Holocaust, selected and edited by Maria Hochberg-Marian´ska and Noe Grüss and published by the Central Historical Commission of Jews in Poland in 1947:
Some of the accounts by these children were found unchanged in my poem, as flourishes in prose, for this was something unequalled by any discovered word; these were the helpless words of a naive child who saw something and related it, when any other throat would have tightened in silence. I recognized that nothing could replace these accounts by children, and to some of the fragments that I wrote-especially in connection with Chagall’s painting- I attached passages of that book: ‘Mama, does death hurt a lot?’ . . . ‘No, only for a while.’ So it was then, in 1947, that I began to take aim at that which seemed inexpressible, and to write the first verses, and to toss them in the trash, until in the 1950s I finally finished it and published it under the editorship of Jan Józef Lipski.
The poem appeared in the weekly Po prostu in 1957, and later in the same year it appeared in the volume Moje strony świata (‘My Corners of the World’). The poet includes it unaltered inOdczytanie popiołów, adding only the last part of an excerpt of a dry report: ‘Bands of thieves prowl the territory of the former extermination camps, looking for gold in the layers of the ashes of the burned remains of the inmates.’
In 1960 Jerzy Ficowski sent Marc Chagall a manuscript of Suzanne Arlet’s French translation of the poem, as well as a Yiddish translation by Jakub Zonszajn.
The poet’s main inspiration was not-as was the case with Makowski or Wojtkiewicz - the paintings of the great artist, but rather the tragic fate of Jewish children during the Holocaust. However, one can discover references in ‘Letter’ to certain of Chagall’s paintings, such as ‘The Green Musician’ or ‘Lovers in a Spray of Lilac’. That same year, Ficowski received a response in Russian from Vence, the artist’s French alpine residence. Two years later, Chagall began to create the first of his illustrations for the poem. After another two years, dissatisfied with his works, he created new versions of them. ‘It is not only Chagall’s original etchings that are enchanting’, wrote Anna Kamien´ska,2 but also the type in which the poem was printed on the same vellum. The etchings are not free compositions, but are literal illustrations of the poem; they deal in the realities about which the poet is speaking.
This modesty and the dependence on the poetic text is particularly touching when we consider that often fine artists in similar situations emphasize the autonomy of their imaginations rather than the effort to co-operate with the poet’s text. The first edition of the etchings was published with the French translation of the poem ‘Letter to Marc Chagall’ in Paris in 1969.3 The London edition of Odczytanie popiołów did not include Chagall’s illustrations. The Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnicza (Independent Publishing House) published them next in an underground edition in 1980. The poet had approached the publishing house Czytelnik earlier, but the complete ban on publication that was in place in the country at the time made publication impossible. The first Polish publication to render in full the quality of Chagall’s illustrations appeared in 1988, a numbered edition published by Interpress with reproductions of the graphics by Marek Holzman.
The poem ‘Postscriptum listu do Marc Chagalla’ (‘Postscript to the Letter to Marc Chagall’) appeared in the 1968 volume Ptak poza ptakiem (‘Bird beyond Bird’, which preceded, and to a great extent foretold, the appearance of Odczytanie popiołów, although the latter did not appear in book form until 1979). Other works that would later be included in Odczytanie popio≥ów appear in this volume alongside ‘Postscriptum’: ‘Egzekucja pamie˛ci’ (‘Execution of Memory’), ‘Diagnozy’ (‘Diagnoses’), and ‘Muranów góruje . . .’ (‘Muranów Rises above . . .’). The last is one of the poems that set the tone for the entire cycle and doubtless one of the most important in all of the poet’s creative output. If we add to this the poem ‘Milczenie ziemi’ (‘The Silence of the Earth’)-published in the 1957 volume Moje strony s´wiata and also included in Odczytanie popio≥ów-then we see that a significant portion of the works included in the volume published in 1979 had appeared much earlier. By the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s, Ficowski’s poetic language had matured to the point that it led Zbigniew Herbert to say of the author of Odczytanie popio≥ów that ‘Ficowski has achieved something that would have seemed impossible: he has given artistically convincing shape to what cannot be embraced by words; he has restored to the faceless their human face, their individual human suffering, that is to say, their dignity.’4
bieta
Another poem in the volume Ptak poza ptakiem that is important to the course of the poet’s development bears the title ‘Wiedza i bezwiednos´c´ oczu’ (‘Knowledge and the Unconsciousness of the Eye’). It appeared in 1966 and is connected with the fate of his future wife. When Elz.bieta Bussold was an infant, her mother hid her in a ventilated box together with a silver spoon engraved with her name and birth date, and took her through the Warsaw ghetto to the ‘Aryan’ side. Her second, adoptive mother cared for her there. The unusual story of the life of this beloved person rescued from the Holocaust, which Ficowski uncovers and tries to understand through conversations with people and archival searches, brings to life with renewed power the tragedy of the Jews left in the ‘shelters of oblivion’: ‘Their barely seen tears overlook so much | original knowledge trampled without dates and without names.’ Odczytanie popiołów ends with a memorable poem dedicated to Bieta and entitled ‘Twoje matki obie’ (‘Both of your Mothers’), in which he calls forth from oblivion the fate of the one who ‘almost was not, so that she could be’- rescued, so that the last word of this book of death could be ‘I am’.
More than a decade had to pass. In this early period, just after the war, I wrote a series of poems that I set aside or discarded. I wrote then: ‘Under the fruitless Torah | under the imprisoned star . . .’. Thirty years had to pass before I returned to these words and wrote a poem about my wife, about her rescue, which is really just beginning. And what was it to be then? I remember that this was to be a poem about those underground hiding places with air flow and water that the condemned Jews, especially the wealthiest ones, built for themselves - hiding places with ventilation and electricity somewhere near their homes, where they planned to wait out the worst of it and emerge when it became possible. I thought to myself then that underneath this great pile of rubble on which the new Muranów district was supposed to arise there exists such a hiding place, such an underground room - one in which there were still people, which even the Germans had not dug out, and which somewhere under the living city had lasted until today, like an undiscovered tomb in the pyramids of Egypt. I understood then that I would not write, shivering, stories on such subjects, and I left it alone. But these few words were useful to me many years later.
Other real figures are recalled in Odczytanie popiołów as well. Among them is Bronisław Anlen, to whom the poem about Treblinka entitled ‘Zbiegowisko kamieni’ (‘A Crowd of Stones’) is dedicated. It was there in Treblinka that this music lover and dentist, who owed his life to his ability to fix the teeth of SS men, lost his entire family. Another such figure is Rachel Auerbach, who was active in education and social assistance in the Warsaw ghetto during the occupation. A publicist and translator, she was a friend of Deborah Vogel, Bruno Schulz’s girlfriend during their time in Lviv. Ficowski corresponded with Auerbach towards the end of her life, when she was living in Israel.
translations from yiddish
The path to ‘the reading of the ashes’ led Ficowski to the task of translation from Yiddish-the language in which much of Jewish literature was created in eastern Europe, and through which poetic testimonies on the Holocaust were recorded. Without a doubt, Ficowski’s friendship with the Jewish poets whose poems he translated into Polish also had a great influence on his penetration into the world of Yiddish. With the help of Izrael Emiot, who returned to Warsaw from exile in the Soviet Union in 1958 and emigrated to the United States in 1960, and Jakub Zonszajn, a collection of whose poetry was published in Warsaw in 1963, the year after his death, Ficowski began to translate popular Yiddish poetry into Polish. Róża Siemiarczuk also translated from Yiddish, and eventually Ficowski’s close work with her and Salomon Łastik led to the publication of an anthology of the popular poetry of Polish Jews entitled Rodzynki z migdałami (‘Raisins and Almonds’), published by Ossolineum in 1964. In 1988, the book was republished with no alterations to the translation. However, Jan Józef Lipski’s demand in his 1966 first review of the book (‘Poezja ludowa Żydów polskich’ (‘Folk Poetry of Polish Jews’)) in Twórczos´c´ was fulfilled: the original authors’ names were included in the reprint. Lipski also wrote: ‘Ficowski has succeeded in creating a kind of uniformity of poetic style in his translations, thanks to which the works . . . despite their variety, seem jointly to belong to a kind of community of poetic language and culture. . . . The discovery of such an original expression of poetic style is, in this type of anthology, perhaps the highest artistic achievement.’
In his Afterword to Rodzynki z migdałami, Ficowski admitted that he had consciously chosen not to include songs of the ghettos and extermination camps in the anthology. He wrote: ‘I did not want the terrible shadow of the crematoria to fall on lyrical lullabies, on coquettish song, or on what I would call the Chagall-like themes of the song of the miracle-working rebbe, which was full of its unique charm.’ Then he mentioned a book that was dedicated solely to that subject: Icchak Kacenelson’s Pieśń o zamordowanym żydowskim narodzie (‘Song of the Murdered Jewish People’), which was first published by Czytelnik in 1982. A translation of the poem based on Jan Lenski’s philological translation had already been prepared in 1971. Considered by many to be masterful, this translation of the work by Kacenelson, the most distinguished testament on the Holocaust by a Jewish poet, was reprinted in a bilingual edition and received worldwide recognition in 1986.
Ficowski also translated Mordechai Gebirtig’s Pieśni (‘Songs’, 1992), as well as the poems of such Yiddish-language poets as Itsik Manger, Morris Rosenfeld, Abraham Raisen, Lejb Najdus, Deborah Vogel, Binem Heller, Israel Emiot, and Jakub Zonszajn.5
In Odczytanie popiołow, Ficowski bears witness not just to the tragedy of the Jews. Like no one else, it seems, he remembered that the Roma were also victims of the Holocaust. Evidence of this is the first volume of the poet’s Ołowiane żołnierze, in which we find ‘Śpiewka o cygańskiej śmierci’ (‘Song of Gypsy Death’): ‘Stars forged with crushed silver, | Amulets, warm tale-bearers | the breeze found in the ashes hidden: | the souls of girls burned before daybreak.’ The moving poem ‘Modlitwa do świętej wszy’ (‘Prayer to the Holy Louse’), about ‘a Gypsy girl in the Birkenau baths | despoiled of colours’, appeared much later in the volume Śmierć jednorożca (‘Death of the Unicorn’, 1981).
After finishing Odczytanie popiołów, Ficowski would reach many more times for his pen to take up his next attempt at ‘reading the ashes’. We find traces of this, if only in the poems ‘Kolejka’ (‘The Train’; dedicated to Rafael Scharf) and ‘Archiwum Ringelbluma’ (‘The Ringelblum Archive’) from the 1981 volume Errata.
the resonance of ODCZYTANIE POPIOłÓW
The volume titled Odczytanie popiołów: Wiersze was first published in London in 1979 by the Association of Jews of Polish Descent. The first edition published in Poland appeared the following year, released by Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnicza. The book was translated into many languages; the first translation, into English, was published in London as early as 1981 with a foreword by Zbigniew Herbert. Credit for this publication goes to Rafael Scharf; while visiting the author in Warsaw, he read a manuscript of the poems and, captivated by them, became determined to get them published. Keith Bosley and Krystyna Wandycz undertook the translation. A French edition, translated and with a foreword by Lucienne Rey, appeared at about the same time. In 1985, a Hebrew edition, translated by Shalom Lindenbaum and with an introduction by Natan Gross, appeared in Israel.
Next came a German edition, translated and with an introduction by Karin Wolff (1986), and a Swedish edition, translated by Rita and Erik Tornborg (1987). But the publication that the poet awaited most eagerly was the translation into Yiddish, ‘the language in which [the heroes of the poems] spoke and in which they were silent’. In his introduction to the bilingual edition, he wrote: ‘Thus my Polish epitaphs become recorded in the cemeteries that do not exist, on the matseyves of the wind, and the Requiem is transformed into the Kaddish. The words of this Polish “unburned brother of theirs” are admitted into the closest community of pain and bereavement, brotherhood and memory.’ The translator was Binem Heller, whose poems Ficowski translated into Polish. In Poland, Odczytanie popiołów did not meet with acceptance and understanding adequate to the import and significance of the poems. This was undoubtedly because of the times, the author’s history with the regime, and the long-standing ban on publication. In the year of the Polish publication-1980-attention was focused on other historical events. Nevertheless, one cannot pass over this essential oversight on the part of Polish literary criticism, or its consequence, the frequent omission of Odczytanie popiołów and the entirety of Jerzy Ficowski’s poetic output from the formation of post-war Polish literature.
However, Ficowski’s works were received with unusual enthusiasm beyond the borders of Poland, and particularly among Holocaust survivors. Many consider these poems the deepest and most authentic testimony to the tragedy of the Holocaust ever penned by a non-Jewish poet. Henryk Grynberg, calling the author ‘the most important voice of memory in Polish poetry’, referred to Odczytanie popiołów as ‘the most outstanding collection of Holocaust poetry’.6 Stanisław Wygodzki, himself the author of a moving poetic testimony on the Holocaust entitled ‘Pamiętnik miłości’ (‘Diary of Love’), concluded his article in the London
Wiadomości (‘News’) by saying: ‘I have not cited so much as a line from this volume - I have not written a review: These poems do not exist outside me.’7
In his letter to the author, Mieczysław Jastrun wrote: ‘I have never read such great poetry in our times. No one has written with such force and truth about the “entry” to Treblinka.’8 Rafael Scharf considered the poems in this volume ‘the most expressive and moving voice of any Pole on the subject of the Holocaust of the Jews’.9
the poet and the wall
While Ficowski was engrossed in ‘the reading of the ashes’, he also worked on the translation of ‘Pieśń o zamordowanym żydowskim narodzie’. His internal conversation with Icchak Kacenelson, who was on the other side of the wall during the war, must have taken place at that time. He must have returned to the times when he walked along that wall with Zbyszek Manys´, tragic in their helplessness and lack of resignation, separated from those who ‘cast themselves sobbing against the wall’. In his heart was the laceration that was the mark of the twentieth century, without which our knowledge of the human condition will remain incomplete.
Burying his poems in the earth so that they would survive, he pressed himself to the wall at Dzielna Street, on the other side of which were Kacenelson and his wife and children. He pressed himself to the wall with extraordinary empathy, helplessness endowing him with determination; for many years he chipped away at the fissure, arriving at the other side ‘too late’, only to read from the ashes the first words of the book: ‘I failed to save | a single life.’ I was separated from the ghetto by the wall. People were imprisoned inside it, but it was also an act that was offensive to me and to others who felt as I did. Being on the outside of the wall, I involuntarily became the overseer of those inside, like someone who is outside of a cage: if it is closed, he becomes its guard, despite the fact that he brought about neither its construction nor its tightness or impermeability. I was an incapacitated onlooker. Walking down Nowy Świat I saw a group of Jews, probably young people, but dressed in traditional gaberdines. Some even had hats on their heads. Driven down the middle of the street by uniformed Germans, the Jews were rolling an auto wheel in front of them. A game with a stick and a wheel. They beat them if the wheel rolled the wrong way. The ghastliness of this is indescribable and was the greater, the more helpless onlookers there were, for none of us moved, none of us helped, not because we didn’t want to, but because we simply could not.
Such events one could not merely observe. Jerzy Ficowski needed to move beyond mere sympathy. The poet, who writes: ‘I would like to just remain silent | but in keeping silent I lie’, has succeeded in crossing to the other side of the wall. We read Odczytanie popiołów because the wall, of which the Warsaw ghetto was only a fragment, still towers between the incapacitated onlookers and the people marked by an armband with a star of David-between Poles and Jews. Its builders, the German architects of the Wannsee conference, could not have foreseen the long life of the dividing wall, which appeared to be just an interlude before the ‘Final Solution’. But later generations must wrestle with it anew, striving to hear and understand the voice ‘of those who lie executed | in the deep silence of the earth’- the generations of those Poles who ‘would like just to go | and in going, trample’.
Translated from the Polish by Claire Rosenson
Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, Volume 21, 29 sierpnia 2008, Source: http://www.littman.co.uk/
1 The statements cited in the text are taken from interviews conducted by the author with Jerzy
Ficowski in 2000–1.
2 ‘List do Marca Chagalla’, Twórczość (1971).
3 190 copies with originals of the five etchings: 1–25 with Chagall’s signature below the etchings;
26–175 with the signatures of the artist and the poet on the title page; and I–XV signed complimentary
copies.
4 Zbigniew Herbert, ‘About my Friend’, introduction to Jerzy Ficowski, A Reading of Ashes, trans
K. Bosley with K. Wandycz (London, 1981).
5 Antologia poezji żydowskiej ed. Słastik and A. Słucki (Warsaw, 1983); and Archiwum Ringelbluma:
Getto warszawskie, ed. R. Sakowska (Warsaw, 1980).
6 Henryk Grynberg, ‘Poeta pamie˛ci’, paper delivered at the seminar ‘Jerzy Ficowski: Człowiek
Pogranicza’ (‘Jerzy Ficowski: Man of the Borderlands’), which took place in Sejny in 1999; typescript
in possession of the author. 7 Odczytanie popiołów, in Wiadomości (London, 1979).
8 I was shown this letter by Ficowski.
9 R. Scharf, Co mnie i tobie Polsko . . . Eseje bez uprzedzeń (Kraków, 1999), 237.