Jerzy Ficowski; Polish poet and author
Hyfler/Rosner
October 4, 1924 - May 9, 2006
Poet and author who sought to preserve the memory of
those who were killed in Poland in the Holocaust
THE Polish poet and author Jerzy Ficowski was
concerned most with the literature of memory - memory above
all of the Nazi Holocaust and its Polish victims, Jews, Roma
and others. In his poems and writings Ficowski sought to
remind his readers of how the memory of such suffering
permeated their landscapes if only they cared to look. And
he tried, while acknowledging the ultimate impossibility of
such a challenge, to imagine the thoughts and feelings of
the Holocaust's victims.
Ficowski also devoted huge amounts of research and
writing to preserving the memory of one of his greatest
heroes - the writer and artist Bruno Schulz, who was
murdered by the Nazis in 1942. Defying all kinds of
difficulties - ranging from the destruction of material to
the political disapproval of communist Poland - Ficowski
painstakingly reconstructed Schulz's life and work, ensuring
that he became a highly respected part of his country's
literary tradition.
Ficowski, born in Warsaw in 1924, found his youth
overshadowed by Poland's precarious position as Nazi and
Soviet power loomed. During the war he joined the Home Army
of Polish resistance, and took part in the 1944 Warsaw
uprising against the Nazis, while the Soviet forces
cynically paused their advance and watched as the resisters
suffered huge casualties.
After the war Ficowski, like other members of the
resistance, was treated with great suspicion by the
Stalinists taking over power in Warsaw. He was forced to
live more or less in hiding, and spent much time in Polish
Roma or Gypsy communities, from which he derived a lifelong
interest in Roma culture, writing its history and publishing
translations into Polish of Roma songs and poetry.
It was during the later war years that Ficowski first
discovered the writings of Schulz, a Polish Jew who lived in
what is now the Ukrainian town of Drohobycz. He tried to
make contact, unaware that the writer had been shot by the
Gestapo in 1942. After the war Ficowski began to collect
material on Schulz's life, ranging eventually as far afield
as the US. There were frustrations, such as hints that
manuscripts of unknown works by Schulz were in KGB archives,
which Ficowski was unable to search. But he was determined
to resist the virtual disappearance of a literary and human
memory. He noted that no trace remained of Schulz's burial
place in his home town, and that the entire Jewish cemetery
in Drohobycz had simply been covered over after the war with
a housing estate.
All Ficowski's efforts culminated in a biography of
Schulz that was published in English as Regions of the Great
Heresy. Ficowski tried to do justice to Schulz's style,
mixing baroque and surrealism as he spun stories around his
provincial life and human relationships.
He also wrote about Schulz's artwork, including the
grotesque work of his final years as he was ordered to
produce pictures to please a Gestapo officer who offered him
temporary protection from the murder of Jews all around.
Ficowski's researches revealed some murals which had
survived in Drohobycz, but he was outraged when officials of
the Yad Vashem museum in Israel came and took these last
traces away. One of Ficowski's constant concerns was to see
figures such as Schulz as distinctively Polish as well as
Jewish; whose memory ought to be most visible where they had
lived and worked.
And that theme of visible memory was constantly
apparent in Ficowski's own writing, including short stories
echoing Schulz, but best known internationally through a
collection of poetry translated into English by Keith Bosley
and published as A Reading of Ashes in 1981. Although not a
Jew himself, Ficowski articulated searingly the memory of
Jewish suffering in the Polish landscape. In the poem
Posthumous Landscape he wrote of train journeys, remembered
from his own childhood, which became the grim routes to the
death camps:
O long since the wagons the wagons
Have run over the landscape and killed it
But posthumous it lasts unpunished to this day
There are no witnesses they have perished
The corpse of my childhood
Was travelling with them
Elsewhere, in poems such as The Execution of Memory,
he was bitter about the postHolocaust amnesia in Poland:
"There is the calm of moans tidied away." But he sought to
recall too, with a kind of anguished imagination, the
actions and thoughts of such Holocaust heroes as the
paediatrician Janusz Korcak who accompanied children to
their deaths, trying to bring some comfort amid the horror:
Suddenly the old Doctor saw
the children had grown
as old as he was
older and older
that was how fast they had to go grey as ash
His fellow Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert said of these
poems that Ficowski had "restored to the faceless their
human face, their individual human suffering, that is to
say, their dignity. In the teeth of hypocritical
indifference and a conspiracy of silence, he has once more
meted out justice before the visible world."
Ficowski's opposition to the communist authorities in
Poland meant his work was frequently banned, but he was
active in samizdat circles, and translated into Polish
writings from languages including Russian, Yiddish, Spanish
and Roma. During the years of the formation of the
Solidarity trade union and imposition of martial law in
Poland, he edited a literary quarterly, Zapis, and was a
member of the Workers' Defence Committee, KOR.
His funeral in Warsaw was attended by representatives
of the anti-communist and Second World War resistance,
fellow writers and a gypsy violinist playing a lament in
memory of a writer who had fought so hard to sustain memory
itself.
He is survived by his wife, Elzbieta Ficowska.
Jerzy Ficowski, poet and author, was born on October
4, 1924. He died on May 9, 2006, aged 81.
