permission from
Poet's Corner Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński (1921-1944) For Poles, Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński's life and poetry have come to symbolize the tragic fate of his generation, which was forced to confront the bewildering evil of the Nazi regime. Just as the young Baczyński was beginning to feel the potency of his poetic gift, his promising future was turned upside down by the Nazi invasion of Poland. Barely out of short pants, death and unimaginable horrors became the formative experiences of his sensitive mind. Baczyński's wartime activities involved the Warsaw literary and military underground, and his patriotic poetry soon came to prominence by their publication in underground journals. He also was a student of Warsaw University's underground Polish Department, but as a friend recalled, he was more of a listener than an active student. Lessons were sometimes held in his apartment, only 100 m from Gestapo headquarters. In 1944, Baczyński was caught up in the preparations for an uprising against the Nazis, and his final letters to his mother, who was living outside of Warsaw, are heart-rending in the extreme for the passionate love he shows for his mother and the deep concern he has for his young wife Barbara: "You understand and love me completely and blindly, just as it should be. And know that your health and life are just as important, if not everything. Other loves often change or develop according to life's conditions and events... but the love between a mother and son is completely different." A week before the uprising he wrote: "My dearest mother... Don't fret, nothing will happen to me..." When the Warsaw Uprising broke out on Aug. 1, 1944, Baczyński and his friends were taken by surprise and couldn't reach their battalion in time. On Aug. 2, he joined a company fighting from the City Hall at Teatralny Square and took part in the conquest of Blanka Palace. On the afternoon of Aug. 4, Baczyński received a gunshot wound to the head while standing at a window on the first floor of the palace and died instantly. Tragically, his wife Barbara was killed by a bomb explosion three weeks later. The 23-year-old poet left more than 500 poems in his wake, an output only explainable by a premonition of death he may have had. Perhaps he felt that only through his poetry could he survive the ascent from darkness to light. Elegy for a Polish Boy They've taken you, my son, from your dreams and like a butterfly they've embroidered you, my son. Your sad eyes bleed ore. They painted landscapes, yellow-stitched, in horror and gore, they adorned a hanged man like a tree, the sea's waves to ply. They taught you, my son, your land and its ways by heart and by its footpaths you sob iron shards for tears. They tuned you in darkness, fed you in loaves of terror. You tread, groping through to dark, the road of fear. And you ascended at night, my golden son, with a black gun you perceived in the passing of a minute-bristling evil's thirst. Before you fell, you hailed the earth with your hand, did it soften your fall, my sweet child, did the heart burst? Introduction and translation by Barry Keane |
| Reproduced with permission from | |
| Click on the logo for current issue of Poland's English language weekly |