Background Info on the Poet of Karmelicka

Adam Zagajewski is a poet, novelist, essayist who was born in Lwów in 1945. He spent his childhood in Silesia and then in Krakow, where he graduated from Jagiellonian University. Zagajewski first became well known as one of the leading poets of the Generation of '68, or the Polish New Wave; he is one of Poland's most famous contemporary poets. His poems and essays have been translated into many languages, and have been routinely featured in The New Yorker. His poetry often deals with his generation's ideas of speaking the truth about the public realities around him. Zagajewski's standard poetic themes include a constant questioning of the biographical-existential role of the protagonist of lyric poetry, and a praise for life viewed in "its changeability, its pulsation, its ambiguity,” as he wrote in Solitary and Solitude (1986).

I found out that Karmelicka Street is a famous road in Krakow, the old capital of Poland. In the The Pianist, a Polish musician named Władysław Szpilma describes Karmelika Street in grisly terms:

“To get to the center of the ghetto, you had to go down Karmelicka Street, the only way there. It was downright impossible not to brush against other people in the street here. The dense crowd of humanity was not walking but pushing and shoving its way forward, forming whirlpools in front of stalls and bays outside doorways. A chilly odour of decay was given off by unaired bedclothes, old grease and rubbish rotting in the streets. At the slightest provocation, the crowd would become panic-stricken, rushing from one side of the street to the other, choking, pressing close, shouting and cursing. Karmelicka Street was a particularly dangerous place: prison cars drove down it several times a day. They were taking prisoners, invisible behind grey steel sides and small opaque glass windows to [the] Gestapo centre, and on the return journey, they brought back what remained of them after their interrogation: bloody scraps of humanity with broken bones and beaten kidneys, their fingernails torn out. When they turned into Karmelicka Street, which was so crowded that with the best will in the world people could not take refuge in doorways, the Gestapo men would lean out and beat the crowd indiscriminately with truncheons.”

This memoir describes how Szpilma survived the German deportations of Jews to extermination camps, the 1943 destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the 1944 Warsaw Uprising during World War II. His description perhaps refers to the “armored divisions enter Poland” that Adam Zagajewski details in his poem.

At the turn of the 20th century, Karmelicka Street was changed into a fashionable boulevard.