Tadeusz Różewicz: A Survivor, a Witness and an Observer of the Holocaust

After the period in which Polish literary critics discussed whether the Holocaust was an issue in the poetry of Tadeusz Różewicz, I think that today there are no doubts about the fact the Holocaust was a major topic in his poetry. Tadeusz Różewicz (1921-2014) had a complex biography, both as a witness to the Holocaust and as a potential victim, since he had Jewish roots, which he was reluctant to accept. In my paper, I would like to illustrate the representation of the Holocaust in his poetry.

In his early poems, right after the war, Różewicz struggled with the need and the will to write poetry in the world after Auschwitz, in which writing poetry is not barbarism, but an impossible task because language and words had lost their meaning. Facing the total devastation of Europe, Różewicz, in this period, related to himself both as a survivor and a witness. Moreover, in his almost seventy years of creative work, the Holocaust and its consequences (moral, cultural, and existential) echoed in his poetry continually. From the late 1990s, Różewicz took the stand of a commentator, and showed that the Holocaust is not an event which was over, but is constantly present in the human world. Różewicz portrays the world after the Holocaust as determined by two apparently opposed phenomena: on the one hand, a world of Holocaust denial. But, on the other hand, this world is saturated with Holocaust’s motifs, symbols and language.