Poetry reacts to historical cataclysms more swiftly than prose. The uprising had already become a theme for poems and songs during the first battles, and many poets, as if they were sensitive seismographs, anticipated their lot falling to turmoil long before the catastrophe. The ranks of the rebels essentially consisted of very young people, even youths, yesterday’s schoolchildren. And among these underground fighters were poets, belonging in the front row of Polish literature, representatives of the generation that were in their 20s during the war: Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, Andrzej Trzebiński, Tadeusz Gajcy, Wacław Bojarski and Tadeusz Borowski. Even before the uprising, these men furiously prepared for armed conflict and simultaneously led extremely rigorous, almost feverish intellectual and artistic lives. It was as if they understood that the time they had was very short. Alas, their premonitions were warranted – during the occupation and particularly over the course of the uprising almost all of these brilliant young men, the hope of Polish culture, ‘were beaten with iron’, per the phrase of David Samoylov.
Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński (1921 – 1944) finished school at the outset of the war. During the occupation, he did Polish studies at an underground Warsaw university. He developed into a poet rather early, but he did not stop there: his artistic growth was distinguished by its rapidity. Baczyński often collaborated with underground magazines and published a few books of poems – also from the underground. In 1943, he enlisted in the Home Army, finishing a secret school for sub-lieutenants, and served in the ‘grey scouts’ assault group – a detachment for special combat missions, mostly sabotage. Despite his asthma, youth and unimpressive physique, he first led the famous Zośka battalion, and later in July 1943 became the deputy platoon commander of the Parasol battalion.
The first day of the uprising caught Baczyński and his comrades unarmed – because of organisational confusion, they did not receive orders from command. They were cut off and were forced to fight their way through, picking up weapons as they fought. Baczyński was killed on 4th August 1944 in the very centre of Warsaw, in Theatre Square. The young wife of Baczyński, Barbara, who was the addressee of many of his poems, also participated in the uprising. At the end of August, she was fatally wounded by a piece of shrapnel to the head, according to one account, also near the Great Theatre, and she died after a few days with a collection of her husband’s poems in her hands.
In the brief time given to the poet, his lyrical poetry underwent more than one metamorphosis. Baczyński’s pre-war poems were characterised by catastrophism, but once the occupation began, he turned to the Romantic tradition of Juliusz Słowacki and Cyprian Kamil Norwid. Even so, his speech remains multifaceted and flowing, and the poems prevail with vivid metaphors and marvellous combinations of unconnected, at first glance, motifs, and also very powerful metaphysical subtext: