In bringing this story forth, Podsiadło makes ample use of words written by others, incorporating information gleaned from the works of prominent Polish scholars of the Holocaust (specifically, from authors of bulky monographs on the Warsaw Ghetto and the Kielce pogrom), and introducing witness testimony, as well as other quotes. Remarkably, all of these, in his pen, come together as a cohesive and strong voice.
What is, however, most remarkable in the context of the poetic canon of Polish Holocaust poetry, is how the poet positions himself in regard to Polish guilt around the Holocaust. Not separating himself from it, he identifies elements of hate speech and antisemitic sentiment as part of the cultural tradition of his own people, rooted deeply in Polish idioms and customs. Adopting the perspective of the Polish Jewish victims of the Kielce pogrom he recognises in the crowd below ‘One hundred of [his] mothers / real Poles’.
Can the tragedy of one Jewish girl, or millions of European Jews be put into words, turned into a poem? 16-year-old Bela Gertner believed that ‘heaps of words were too trifle a thing to testify to the death of a murdered, innocent child’, nor could ‘writing memory books immortalise the Jews who were burned in the furnaces’. And yet Bela did write poems. For Podsiadło this becomes the ultimate justification of his own poetic endeavour. Invoking ‘the hunger’ of literature and poetry in the Warsaw Ghetto, he lists the names of Kirman, Szajewicz and Kacenelson, Jewish poets who perished in the ghetto. ‘But even There and Then people trusted poems’, he says, and this power of poetry legitimises also his work, yet another word in ‘the pillar of words’. One more poem we can and should trust.
Author: Mikołaj Gliński, Jan 2022
Further reading:
Polish Literature and the Holocaust (1939-1968), edited by Sławomir Buryła, Dorota Krawczyńska, Jacek Leociak; Peter Lang, 2020.
Natan Gross, Poeci i Szoa. Obraz Zagłady Żydów w poezji polskiej, Sosnowiec, 1993.