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.
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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:
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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:
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.
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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.