Wilhelmine Trsek
traktował to jak zadanie
otrzymał zadanie którego na pewno nie chciał
co by się stało gdyby odmówił?
nic więcej nie wiem
ale na pewno bardzo to przeżywał
Odilo Globocnik
to mówi sekretarka jego
Wilhelmine Trsek
*
Dr. Victor Capesius
sprawiałem że ludzie sami z siebie
niejako z własnej woli
ustawiali się w szeregu
tych którzy przeznaczeni byli na śmierć
byłem bowiem dobrym retorem
*
żandarm Bove
dwie Żydówki nago do dołu wrzucił i zakopał
i z dumą przyznawał że ich nie zgwałcił
chociaż były rzadkiej urody
*
H e r m a n n G ö r i n g
każdy może nakręcić film o zbrodniach
jeśli wyciągnie zwłoki z grobów
a potem pokaże traktor spychający je tam z powrotem
*
prawnych
był tak wstrząśnięty
że wystąpił z żądaniem zaprzestania zabijania
albo stworzenia dla niego jakichś podstaw prawnych
*
udawało
było rzeczą niesłychanie trudną
nie dostrzeganie związku między strzelaniem a zabijaniem
ale nam się udawało
*
mówi Polak
jak wam nie wstyd
szliście na rzeź jak krowy
z ohne Orchester
Grzegorz Kwiatkowski
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.
