From the Annals of Kraków

What can we say about the past when so much of the past is lost? This is a question that every writer who writes about the past must consider.My mother, a Polish nineteen-year-old when the Germans came to her home in Eastern Poland, felt the weight of her mother's death and her sister's death and her sister's baby's death at the hands of the Nazis all her life, but what can I know of those deaths. There was my mother's horror when she told me the stories, but my mother could not tell me much without breaking down, turning her face and its tears away from me. And so, what's left to learn, what can I as a writer know about my mother's grief, my grandmother's face when she was shot again and again, my aunt's absolute sorrow when she saw her baby daughter kicked to death, the baby's screams that would not stop?There are no photographs of what happened, no news reports, no eye witnesses now that even my mother is gone, and all that's left is just a handful of broken memories that will never truly belong to me.So, what can I say?This is the question I repeatedly asked myself in Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded, my book about my parents’ experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany, and this is the question almost everyone who writes about the horrors committed by the Germans during World War II must ask. What can we say?Probably the most famous expression of this question was voiced by the philosopher Theodore Adorno when he said that it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.But still poets write poetry about the Holocaust and the horrors of World War II.Piotr Florczyk is such a poet.Florczyk's book, From the Annals of Kraków, is based on the research he did at the University of Southern California Shoah Center for Advanced Genocide Research in Los Angeles. He spent two weeks watching visual recordings of testimonies from Polish Jews from Kraków who were victims of the Holocaust.In my opinion, the strongest poems regarding the Holocaust are those that include the actual words of its victims. Florczyk understands this. He goes out of his way to allow the survivors’ words to speak for themselves without—as he says in his acknowledgements—“heigthen[ing] the rhetorical effect” of the testimonials he was using from his source or “sensationaliz[ing] the stories.”You see this throughout the poems in this book. Here, for example, is the conclusion of poem VIII: After the Germans tattooed the numberson our forearms, we tried to suck them out beforethey became part of us. (p. 19)What we hear, therefore, in the poetry in Florczyk's powerful book is a directness and clarity and strength of language that immediately grabs us and tells us to listen, and what we hear are tales of trauma and survival, despair and hope. The speakers who Florczyk features in his poems to tell us about the Holocaust provide us with a wide range of experiences that go far beyond the most common stories of being taken to the camps. We read about survivors who worked filling holes in roads, who were taken in and hidden by Poles, who survived because they could speak German as well as Polish, who found a village where there were no Germans, who as children knew they were Jewish because they were always hiding. These stories flesh out the Holocaust, suggest that it is more than a tale of trains and ovens and tattoos. Reading Florczyk's poems with their embedded stories of suffering and survival, I often felt like I was once again listening to my mother telling me about her experiences under the Germans in World War II.But this isn't the only reason why I feel Florczyk's book of poems about the Holocaust is exceptional. Like the best poets writing about the Holocaust, Florczyk writes about the horror that we don't expect to find in the poetry focused on the Holocaust. And what also distinguishes his poetry is his awareness of himself as a writer carrying on the story of the Holocaust. He is aware that he, of course, is not a Holocaust survivor.This awareness appears throughout the book in the poems that talk about his visit to Kraków, the city he originally came from, to discover more about the Holocaust and how the Jews of Kraków responded to it. He wants us to know that the words of these survivors are not his, and their stories are not his. They belong to others, people—as he says in one of the poems—in a far corner who “hum with the stories of survival.”For me, this is the most important point Piotr Florczyk makes in his excellent book. In describing his return to Kraków and his attempt to discover more about the Holocaust, what I think he discovers is that no matter what he wants to discover about the Holocaust there are limits to what he can discover, what he can open himself to. I think this is finally what all the great poets who write about the Holocaust discover: the absolute impossibility of understanding the suffering of those who suffered. All of us who write about the Holocaust are finally simply tourists

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