Jerzy Ficowski: A Reading of Ashes

Summary

In 1943, Jerzy Ficowski was nineteen years old. He had not yet made his personal mark in a world of violence and horror, but his personal reconciliation with suffering had already been born.… I am not asking when Jerzy Ficowski's “Jewish affair” began. The question is rather when the poet's human affair began—an affair that, with the passage of time, was transformed into an allegorical, spiritual, and emotional union with people who were condemned to a cruel death only because they were “of a different origin.” You cannot simply show up at the time of someone else's death, to take it on as your own; you cannot simply take on another's suffering, humiliation, homelessness as your own, as private, as such a personal experience that you can write poetry about it.

—Stanisław Wygodzki

For many years, Jerzy Ficowski bore within himself the pain of an “incapacitated onlooker.” He spent decades searching for the language and form that would allow him to express his feelings from the time of the Holocaust. In poems from the cycle Odczytanie popiołów (A Reading of Ashes: Poems)—a cycle of poems so difficult to write about because they are so stark, so undiluted, so silent—the author's path is powerfully present, patiently pervading the words like a ripening of fruit. This poet's path, too, is most interesting to me—a series of circumstances arising from a youthful empathy for the suffering of others, an empathy that, imperceptibly, became a lifelong commitment. How was it for that boy, from the moment on that one day when he saw little Raizl on Smolna Street, nestled in a corner between the cigarette booth and the wall of an apartment building, shivering with cold. How was the poet born after the Holocaust, during a time when poetry was doomed to impossibility?

First Attempts and Glimmers

The first poem dedicated to the tragedy of the Jews appeared during the occupation and was preserved in the author's archive. He himself says of it: “[It is] not a good poem, but it arose from a kind of need and a kind of inability—from not being reconciled to what was happening and from powerlessness to oppose it.”

In 1947, Ficowski published a moving article titled “Dzieci” [Children] in the Kraków periodical Naprzód. In it he describes the emotions of two boys—himself and his friend Zbyszek Manyś.