Episode #15: “My Warsaw”: Magdalena Zurawski on the Warsaw Uprising
In episode #15 I talk with writer Magdalena Zurawski about her research into her great-grandfather, Czeslaw Kowalczyk’s, story. Arrested by the Nazi’s during the Warsaw Uprising, he was taken to a concentration camp. Magdalena spent 2022-23 on a Fulbright Scholarship in Warsaw, tracking what happened next and growing obsessed with twentieth-century avant-garde Polish writer Miron Białoszewski. We discuss the uprising, which led to the Nazi destruction of Warsaw and the killing of 250,000 Polish people in just two months. We also discuss the earlier Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the burning of the ghetto that followed. Where do history and the imagination meet? What is the nature of truth? And how can you get older Polish women to talk to you on buses? Maggie reads from her powerful (and very funny) work-in-progress.
People and histories mentioned and discussed
Miron Białoszewski, Poems and Song
Miron Bialoszewski, A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising
Czeslaw Milosz, Campo dei Fiori
Ilya Kaminsky, We Lived Happily During the War
Magdalena Zurawski at Czeslaw Kowalczyk’s grave in Denmark
Magdalena Zurawski is a poet and prose writer. Her most recent poetry collection is The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs of Freedom (Wave Books). She was a 2022-23 Fulbright Scholar in Poland, where she traced family war histories for her current book project and began translating poet Miron Bialoszewski's prose work, Heart Attack. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia.
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