Did the Poet Die? The Mysterious Death & Resurrection of Józef Czechowicz

jozef_czechowicz_en.jpg, default, Józef Czechowicz, Warsaw, 1936, from ‘Nic więcej’ by J. Czechowicz with dedication to Stanisław Piętak, photo: Muzeum Literatury / East News

#language & literature

The outstanding Polish poet Józef Czechowicz was one of the first victims of the Second World War – in September 1939 he died during the German air force’s barbarian bombardment of Lublin. However, some of the circumstances surrounding his death are still hidden by a thick veil of secrecy, which gives this tragic event traits of a real literary mystery. What really happened? Where did the legend that Czechowicz managed to survive come from?

Death in earnest

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Krakowskie Przedmieście, Lublin, 1918–39, photo: www.audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)

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On the morning of 9 September 1939, an apocalypse reigned on the streets of Lublin. German bombers pummelled the city, which was completely unprepared for an air attack, with hundreds of bombs. Smoke billowed from ruins, the historic city centre was on fire, the streets were covered with broken glass, the city lost water, electricity and telephone connectivity, hospitals were overcrowded with the wounded. Around one thousand people, mostly peaceful civilians, lost their lives. This day was also a tragedy for Polish poetry – among the bombing victims was the outstanding Polish poet Józef Czechowicz.

Thumbnail — Józef Czechowicz, photo: www.audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)

Józef Czechowicz, a Lublin native, was one of the most brilliant Polish poets of the pre-war period and a member of the so-called ‘second avant-garde’. From 1933, he lived in Warsaw, where he worked in Polish radio and created many radio shows. He also continued to write poems. He was in the capital when World War II broke out. Over the next few days, thousands of people travelled from Warsaw to Lublin, fleeing the rapidly approaching front lines. On 6 September 1939, Czechowicz left Warsaw with his friend the poet and journalist Henryk Domiński, as well as his colleagues Kazimierz Wójcik and Stefan Górski. The writers made it to Lublin in the early morning of 9 September after three days of travel on postal horses.

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Lublin Cathedral & Trinity Gate, Lublin, photo: www.audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)

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Wanting to clean up after the tiring journey, Czechowicz, well-known for his neatness and fastidiousness, decided to go to Pani Ostrowska’s barbershop at the corner of Krakowskie Przedmieście and Kosciuszko Street to wash and shave. His companions followed behind. And at that moment, the air raid sirens began their prolonged wail – German bombers descended upon the city like vultures. Several bombs hit the building that housed the barbershop, and one of them smashed through the ceiling and fell directly into the salon.

Yet by a strange coincidence, the bomb did not explode. All ten people who were in the barbershop at the time threw themselves to the floor near the surviving wall and lived – all except Czechowicz, who, according to Domiński, ‘rushed in the opposite direction, right at the bomb, as if it were pulling him with a magnet’. The poet was covered with debris in an instant.

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Lubartowska Street, main artery of Jewish district, Lublin, 1938, photo: www.audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)

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Domiński, Wójcik and Górski, overwhelmed with shock, somehow got out onto the street. They went to the nearby Express Lubelski newspaper office, where they relayed what had happened to its editor, the poet Wacław Gralewski, who was a close friend of Czechowicz’s. Gralewski would later relate their disjointed story in the pages of his novella Wataha atamana Łobodi (Ataman Lobodi’s Band, 1963) and again in the book Stalowa tęcza (The Steel Rainbow, 1968), which was dedicated to the life and work of Czechowicz. According to him, Czechowicz’s companions assured him that the poet could not be saved and went right from the editorial office to drink vodka in memory of their deceased comrade. Czechowicz’s remains were recovered from the rubble – they were identified only by a pocket Polish-German dictionary that had on its title page the inscription in pencil: ‘Property of Józef Czechowicz’. This dictionary was placed in the poet’s grave in Lublin’s old Eastern Orthodox cemetery on Lipowa Street, where he was buried alongside fellow victims of the bombardment. In 1969, a monument to the poet by sculptor Tadeusz Skwarczyński was erected on the site of the ruined building at 46 Krakowskie Przedmieście where Czechowicz had died.

It would appear that there isn’t, nor could there possibly be, anything mysterious about this tragic story. However, it only seems that way at first glance.

A Lublin ‘Rashomon’

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Lublin, photo: Krzysztof Borkowski

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The circumstances of Czechowicz’s death still raise a number of questions among scholars of the poet’s work, questions that can only be answered hypothetically. For instance, the events preceding the poet’s visit to that fateful barbershop were described by various eyewitnesses so differently that it almost resembles Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon, where the same event is shown from the point of view of different characters, and their stories completely contradict each other.

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Józef Czechowicz, drawing by Roman Kramsztyk, 1931, photo: Wikipedia

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Thus, the famous photographer Edward Hartwig, Czechowicz’s Lublin acquaintance, recalled that he met with the poet a few minutes before the bombing near the Europejski Hotel, and Czechowicz went on foot from there to Ostrowska’s barbershop. Whereas according to Aleksandra Kruszyńska, a friend of the poet’s, she was walking past that very barbershop when the air raid began. At that moment, a car pulled up next to her, and Czechowicz came out of it. Kruszyńska begged him to wait out the bombing in the church, but the poet calmly said that he was dirty and unshaven from the road and, ignoring her pleas, went into the salon. Literary history knows examples of such inconsistencies, such as the death of Mikhail Lermontov: the testimonies of the four seconds who were present at this duel with Martynov do not coincide at all. By some inconceivable means, on the day of his death (let us recall that the poet died at half past nine in the morning), Czechowicz managed to meet with another one of his Lublin acquaintances, Aleksander Maliszewski, who recalled that the poet had shown him his palm and uttered a cryptic phrase: ‘I’m not worried about me. Someone I completely trust told me that my lifeline won’t end soon’.

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Postcard from Czechowicz to Roman Kołowiecki, editor of journal ‘Droga’, with request to publish poem ‘Hildur, Baldur i czas’, photo: Tomasz Rytych / AG

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Information concerning events following Czechowicz’s death are even more vague. It is not known exactly when his body was pulled out from under the rubble, how it was identified and where exactly it was buried. All the more so, since the direct witness to Czechowicz’s death, Henryk Domiński, did not really have the chance to talk about the incident – he was shot by the Nazis in 1942 as a member of the anti-fascist underground. Wacław Gralewski’s account of the identification of the poet’s remains by the dictionary found in his pocket also raises doubts. The fact is, on the day of the Lublin bombardment, no rescue operations were carried out at the site of the destroyed barbershop. The ruins of the burned-out building at 46 Krakowskie Przedmieście were not dismantled until the beginning of October 1939. It was then that the bodies of the dead were buried in mass graves at the Eastern Orthodox cemetery on Lipowa Street along with other victims of the bombing.

jozef czechowicz jan wydra 1937_5890415.jpg — Józef Czechowicz, drawing by Jan Wydra, 1937.

It is also impossible to establish for certain what dictionary was used to identify the poet’s remains. Some sources mention a Polish-German phrasebook, others a Polish-English one. For instance, Czesław Miłosz, who was friends with Czechowicz, wrote: ‘The body was identified by a pocket English dictionary with a red cover with which Czechowicz never parted’. Modern researchers do not exclude the possibility that Gralewski made up the story of the dictionary to make his version of events sound more believable. Furthermore, he doesn’t write about Czechowicz’s burial – it is impossible to believe that a close friend of the poet’s, the one who identified his body, would not accompany him to his final resting place. There is not a single piece of evidence that sheds any light on the details of Czechowicz’s burial. And so, the thought naturally arises – was there a funeral?

Józef Czechowicz (ok. 1925 roku), fot. archiwum Muzeum Literackiego im. J. Czechowicza — Józef Czechowicz, 1925, photo: Józef Czechowicz Literary Museum archives

Most importantly: if the dictionary enabled the identification of Czechowicz’s body, why did it end up in a common grave? After all, if the remains of the poet were actually identified and one of his friends was present, surely Czechowicz would’ve been buried separately. But none of Czechowicz’s friends was present at his burial – at least not that we know of. Most likely, the body was not identified, and some unknown remains, pulled from the rubble, were buried in the Eastern Orthodox cemetery on Lipowa Street under the name of Józef Czechowicz. Incidentally, it was at one time thought that the poet was buried in the cemetery on Unicka Street or, according to another version, in the cemetery near Kraśnicka Avenue.

One way or another, anyone who tries to reconstruct a detailed picture of what happened will be left with the feeling that the poet simply disappeared into thin air. There is a sense of symbolism in the entry in the cemetery office’s records, where opposite the surname Czechowicz in the column titled ‘Place of Residence’ is simply written ‘Poet’. How can one not recall the famous line from Sergey Solovyov’s film Assa: ‘He’s a poet, he lives out in the world’.

Sheer mysticism

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Lublin, Błażej Pindor for OTWARTE MIASTO MMXV festival, Lublin, 2015, photo: culture.pl promotional materials

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Błażej Pindor, plakat do Festiwalu Sztuki w Przestrzeni Publicznej OTWARTE MIASTO MMXV w Lublinie, 2015, fot. materiały promocyjne

Ironically, this whole story is quite in the spirit of Czechowicz, who loved all sorts of mystifications. There was a reason why critics called Czechowicz the ‘poet of the night, restless dreams, ghosts, fears and gloomy lullabies’. Endowed with a kind of sixth sense, the poet had a premonition of the impending Catastrophe – like all shamans and prophets, he had the gift of foreseeing the future.

Indeed, Czechowicz’s everyday life was not devoid of theatricalization – he acted out every day as if it were a play. A pipe and cane were important components of his appearance, but the most intriguing of his accessories was a paper mask which he would wear whenever young poets came to his editorial office to read their poems. The mask had only one hole, for the mouth, so that Czechowicz could talk to the visitor without seeing his face and thus remain impartial when evaluating a literary work.

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Józef Czechowicz, photo: www.audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)

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Czechowicz believed in divination, repeatedly participated in spiritual seances, and ordered horoscopes from fortune-tellers. He saw a different, parallel reality behind most of the events in the world around him. He would also experience real visions, during which the poet seemed to be daydreaming. Besides this, Czechowicz was certain that he had a double, like Esenin’s ‘black man’, and this very much frightened the poet. Feeling that evil forces were surrounding him, Czechowicz, to deceive fate, took on a new name – Henryk. He explained it like this to a friend: ‘I’m taking a new name to fool bad luck’.

At the same time, Czechowicz loved life and was by no means a misanthrope who shied away from pleasure. He was known to have a sweet tooth and wrote advertising copy for pastry shops so that they would allow him to stuff himself with cakes for free. His pockets were always filled with candy. He loved sweet alcohol, wines and liqueurs. The poet’s personal life was also quite wild, though he never divulged the details to anyone. In Polish artistic circles, Czechowicz is sometimes perceived as a gay icon, but biographers don’t know anything about his relations with men for certain. There is, however, much evidence of his romances with the fair sex.

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‘Spacer z Czechowiczem’ locations described in ‘Poemat o Lubline’, organized annually by ‘Brama Grodzka – Teatr NN’ Centre, photo: Jakub Orzechowski / AG

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However that may be, the premonition of an early demise came to be Czechowicz’s obsession. In 1925 the poet even ordered himself a bookplate with the Latin dictum ‘Vita somnium breve’ (Life is a short dream), citing it later in the poem ‘ballada z tamtej strony’ (ballad from the other side). He even correctly ‘guessed’ the location of his future burial place – the Eastern Orthodox cemetery on Lipowa Street, which he described in Poem about the City of Lublin:

Clocks, night’s joyless faces,

give the password: mid - night, mid - night...

Down below

are city squares – sand-colored, flaxen-colored;

and streets – the long dugouts of darkness

tethered by chains of streetlamps.

On Lublin’s outskirts lies a black quadrangle.

The poem chants with a murmur of winds.

Birches, chestnut trees, arborvitaes, maples

gather round the island of the dead.

At night deserted alleys mutter like drainpipes.

The pale light of a lonely star rests against a shadow,

against ivy, somber periwinkle,

ferns.

Crosses of marble, bronze angels have stood up

sternly on the tops of coffins.

A rooster crows.

Engrave into your memory the inscription on the cemetery gate:

‘Here now into dust will I fall asleep – on the last day from dust I shall arise…’

[trans. Kevin Grabowski-Christianson and Halina Ablamowicz, https://teatrnn.pl/leksykon/artykuly/poem-on-the-city-of-lublin-1934/]

Czechowicz’s friends Wacław Gralewski and Konrad Bielski recalled how in 1927 they went for a walk out of town together with the poet. Their path lay through the half-abandoned Eastern Orthodox cemetery on Lipowa Street. Suddenly, Czechowicz cried out and lost consciousness. When he came to, he told his friends that behind the small cemetery churchlet he saw something like an explosion, a sheaf of fire and puffs of smoke, and from there some kind of ghost stretched long bony hands out towards him, trying to grab his throat with one hand and pointing to the ground beneath his feet with the other. It was in this place, according to most scholars, that Czechowicz was buried twelve years later.

Czechowicz also ‘predicted’ his death in the barbershop. In 1939 he published Smutny felieton. Pada deszcz (A Sad Feuilleton: It’s Raining) describing a barbershop in which severed heads in wigs were on display. All this could, of course, be called a coincidence – but aren’t there too many ‘coincidences’ in this whole story?

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Czesław Miłosz, photo: SIPA / East News

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Here is what Czesław Miłosz, who was a friend of Czechowicz’s, said in the Parisian publication Kultura:

Once in 1938 I recounted a dream of mine to Czechowicz. In it I saw a house, one of the walls of which was made of glass, and behind this glass a man with a Mongolian face was playing the violin, and this man was Czechowicz. I didn’t hear the sound of the music. Knowing about his obsessive fear of a sudden death, I kept silent about the fact that in my dream, this house was called The House of the Dead.

[orig. in ‘Kultura’ 1954 nr 7–8 (81–82)]

After the war Miłosz would go to visit Czechowicz’s grave without fail, whenever he visited Lublin (the Polish Nobelist would go there three times – in 1981, 1996 and 2000). In Traktat poetycki (A Treatise on Poetry), Miłosz wrote about his deceased friend:

He loved what was small, gathered an idyllic dream Of an apolitical, defenceless land. O birds and trees! Be good to him. Protect Joe’s grave in Lublin from time

Mysterious resurrection

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Marcin Wroński, photo: Grzegorz Winnicki

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It is not surprising that over time, the unexplained circumstances of Józef Czechowicz’s tragic death gave rise to many fantastical interpretations, rumours, conjectures and legends. And soon, as is often the case, the literary myth migrated from the realm of gossip into literature itself.

Today, Józef Czechowicz has unexpectedly ‘risen again’ … on the pages of Polish crime fiction. His features are easily distinguished in the image of Lublin poet and editor of the local newspaper Kurier, Jerzy Trąbicz, one of the characters in Marcin Wroński’s series of detective novels about the adventures of Commissioner Zygmunt Maciejewski, which take place in pre-war and later German-occupied Lublin.

In the novel A na imię jej będzie Aniela (And Her Name Shall Be Aniela, 2011), Trąbicz, like Czechowicz, dies in a Lublin barbershop when a German bomb falls on it, but he somehow miraculously survives, joins the ranks of the anti-fascist underground and apparently reinvents himself – from a timid and insecure intellectual, the poet Trąbicz is transformed into the stern, forceful Captain Brener. The only decadent pre-war habit he retains is a weakness for flavoured ladies’ cigarettes. Here is how Wroński describes a meeting between Commissioner Maciejewski and the resurrected Czechowicz-Trąbicz:

He had barely opened the door when he heard, ‘Please don’t turn on the light, Commissioner.’ The voice seamed familiar to him, but … No, this was some kind of mistake. The man he had thought of at first had already been dead six months. ‘And don’t reach for your piece. You’ll miss anyway’. […]

A match flared next to the cupboard, and the room filled with the smell of pre-war perfumed tobacco.

‘Trą-bicz?!’ Maciejewski stammered.

‘No, his ghost!’ the editor burst out laughing. […]

The tip of his cigarette burned more brightly, lighting up a pudgy face and bangs falling onto his forehead. […]

Trąbicz! His resurrected version differed a great deal from the pre-war one. This was no longer the effeminate poet looking around at young boys or even the wily journalist who had helped Maciejewski in 1931. The new Trąbicz had unperturbedly let the first person in and with a single smooth movement stuck the cold muzzle of his Browning against the ear of the second person.

[trans. Dobrochna Fire]

It’s quite curious that Trąbicz-Brener writes down secret instructions for his comrades-in-arms on torn-out pages of a book with fragments of Józef Czechowicz’s Poem about the City of Lublin. This choice was no accident. Poem about the City of Lublin, written by Czechowicz in 1934, is a kind of theatrical performance in verse and at the same time a walking quest which, if you select the right key for this text, can help you find your way perfectly around the Lublin of that era. And besides that, these are simply beautiful poems about the city Czechowicz loved and for which he so yearned when he was living in Warsaw:

Cobblestone streets, tenement-buildings of stone,

walls dark and sloping.

The moon rolls about the steep roof – so low.

Hold on. Wait a moment –

like a pearl

the moon will tumble into the basin of the town square –

the basin will clink.

In the tawny night,

in and around old familiar corners, nooks, niches, recesses,

at gates, doorframes, and windows

a violet shadow, broken down,

enfeebled,

will kneel.

Yellow stars, cut down by the July heat,

fly – like a cloud of dust – they fly;

they wrinkle the firmament in gold streaks;

behind the Tribunal

in blind windowpanes the yellow stars gleam

as if fired from a silent rifle.

The summer night waits patiently:

will the moon drift down, will it clink,

will it descend Grodzka Street.

Like silver the moon melts

in the morning dew, in the herbs’ scent.

How beautiful!

[trans. Kevin Grabowski-Christianson and Halina Ablamowicz, https://teatrnn.pl/leksykon/artykuly/poem-on-the-city-of-lublin-1934/]

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‘Spacer z Czechowiczem’ around places described in ‘Poemat o Lublinie’, organized annually by Brama Grodzka – Teatr NN Centre, photo: Jakub Orzechowski / AG

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Like Czechowicz, Marcin Wroński also plays with the reader – up until the very end of the book, when Trąbicz-Brener goes to the capital to die in the Warsaw Uprising, it remains unclear whether the poet really survived the bombing of Lublin or came from the afterlife as some otherworldly representative. It’s not without reason that the poet gloomily laughs off Commissioner Maciejewski’s remark that Trąbicz changed so much after his death that he only recognized him by the smell of ladies’ cigarettes: ‘Otherwise I would smell like a corpse’. But does any of this really matter? The guarantee of a poet’s immortality lies in his poems, and we can say with complete confidence that through them Józef Czechowicz still managed to achieve victory over death.

Translated by Kat Albierti

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