Building the Barricade by Anna Swirszczynska

Building the Barricade, harrowing and demanding, here takes its place in English among the twentieth century's master works of war-witness.”—Jane Hirshfield

Building the Barricade, is poetry of witness, and a lyric account of the sixty-three day Warsaw uprising.

Caught between German occupation and the advancing Soviets, the Polish Resistance Home Army barricaded central Warsaw in hopes of liberating the city and gaining Polish sovereignty. Building the Barricade is Anna Świrszczyńska’s first-person account of the atrocities that destroyed over 60% of the Polish capital and left over 100,000 civilians and 16,000 Polish resistance fighters dead.

Świrszczyńska had joined the resistance as a military nurse and later wrote: “Day and night German bombers raged over the capital, burying the living beneath the rubble.”

Anna Świrszczyńska was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1909. She attended Warsaw University where she studied medieval and baroque Polish literature. She began publishing poems in the 1930s. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, Świrszczyńska joined the Polish Resistance and was a military nurse during the Warsaw Uprising. Anna Świrszczyńska died in Krakow of cancer in 1984.

Piotr Florczyk is the author of East & West, a volume of poems, Barefoot, a chapbook of poems, and Los Angeles Sketchbook, a collection of brief essays and photographs. He has also translated several books of Polish poetry. He teaches global literary studies at the University of Washington, Seattle.