Wilhelmine Trsek
he considered it his duty
he was given a task he did not want
what would have happened if he had refused?
this is all I know
but Odilo Globočnik
has undoubtedly been through a lot
says his secretary
Wilhelmine Trsek
*
Dr. Victor Capesius
I persuaded the people to do it
to form into lines themselves
as if of their own free will
the people who had been destined for death
because I was a good rhetorician
*
Gendarme Bove
he threw two naked Jewish women into a pit and buried them
and proudly declared that he had not raped them
although they were of rare beauty
*
Hermann Göring
anyone can make a film about crimes
pulling corpses out of graves
and then showing tractors pushing them in again
*
legal basis
he was so shocked
that he called for an end to the killing
or a legal basis for it
*
we managed
it was extremely difficult
not to see the connection between shooting and killing
but we managed
*
a Pole says
are you not ashamed
you went to the slaughterhouse like cattle
from Without an Orchestra
Grzegorz Kwiatkowski
translated from the Polish by Peter Constantine
Listen to an excerpt of the original Polish read by the author:
In 2015, Grzegorz Kwiatkowski was walking through the forests near the Stutthof Concentration Camp, some twenty miles east of Gdansk, where his grandfather had been interned during the Second World War. As he made his way through the underbrush in the direction of the camp he came upon several thousand shoes. They were tattered, grimy and gray, many decades old: the shoes of the dead, taken off the feet of the people who had been murdered by the Nazis. As the British newspaper The Times was to report, Kwiatkowski had stumbled upon over half a million shoes.
Kwiatkowski launched a massive campaign, lobbying the directors of the Stutthof Museum to gather the shoes. With pressure mounting, the directors acquiesced, but, to international dismay, instead of preserving the shoes as a gruesome testimony to the crimes committed during the Holocaust, they buried them.
For Kwiatkowski, these actions are symbolic of society’s preference for silence in the face of history’s terrors. In his poetry he brings together the stark voices of victims, perpetrators, collaborators, and apologists, all bearing witness—in very different ways—to pogroms, brutality, and murder.
Kwiatkowski launched a massive campaign, lobbying the directors of the Stutthof Museum to gather the shoes. With pressure mounting, the directors acquiesced, but, to international dismay, instead of preserving the shoes as a gruesome testimony to the crimes committed during the Holocaust, they buried them.
For Kwiatkowski, these actions are symbolic of society’s preference for silence in the face of history’s terrors. In his poetry he brings together the stark voices of victims, perpetrators, collaborators, and apologists, all bearing witness—in very different ways—to pogroms, brutality, and murder.
Grzegorz Kwiatkowski (b. 1984) is a Polish poet and musician, a member of the Polish psychedelic rock band Trupa Trupa, and the author of several books of poetry focusing on history, remembrance, and ethics. Volumes of his poetry have appeared in English, French, Slovene, and Greek, and translations of his poems have been published in British and US literary and cultural magazines such as Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today, and World Poetry Review. He is a member of PEN America and the European poetry platform Versopolis.
Peter Constantine has translated work by Augustine, Solzhenitsyn, Rousseau, Machiavelli, Gogol, and Tolstoy. His translation of Grzegorz Kwiatkowski’s poetry cycle Crops was published by Rain Taxi in 2021. He is also Kwiatkowski’s German translator: brennend (burning; 2023) and ohne Orchester (without an Orchestra; 2024) were published by parasitenpresse, a Cologne-based publishing house. Constantine is a professor of translation studies at the University of Connecticut and the publisher of World Poetry Books.
