Through anecdotes, stories, and notations - some as brief as "I was slapped today in Zlota Street" - there emerges the agonizing, eyewitness accounts of human beings caught in the furor of senseless, unrelenting brutality. In the Journal, there is the whole of life in the Ghetto, from the erection of the Wall, in November 1940, for hygienic reasons, through the brief period of deceptive calm to the eventual mass murders. It is a portrait of man tested by crisis, stained at times by the meanness of avarice and self-preservation, illumined more often by moments of nobility. Emmanual Ringelblum was 39 when he began his notes. When the Germans first invaded Poland, Ringelblum, who could have stayed abroad and escaped, returned to Warsaw from Switzerland knowing that his was an historical event of importance for his people and a moment in time that must be forever a part of written history. As the recognized archivist of the Ghetto he gathered around him a staff, and assigned each to cover a specific part of Ghetto life. From these reports and this notes, he assembled his Journal. On March 7, 1944, Emmanual Ringelblum was executed among the ruins of Warsaw, together with his wife, his son, and thirt-eight others who shared his hiding place.

    The intellectual emigrated for political reasons, the worker to find work ...

    In . . . Anna Swir there is a similar empathy and forgiveness." -Czeslaw Milosz"In the same way that memory gave birth to the muses, Anna Swir crafted exquisite mnemonic miniatures thirty years after the Warsaw Uprising, miniatures that allowed human hope to shine through bloody rubble. Reading Swir, one longs to know this heroic poet, who, like Whitman, nursed humans broken by war. Piotr Florczyk translates the poems in Building the Barricade with chilling precision, constructing equations that become magical spells to address the twentieth century and serve as cautionary tales for the twenty-first." -Sandra Alcosser"To translate Anna Swir is to translate a cemetery's stories as nakedly and starkly as any human can. It is to tread on hallowed, stunned ground-the ground of an earth stricken not by its own nature but by our species' own warring, bombarding instincts. Only reverence could lead someone properly into the reaches of Swir's numbed witness of the atrocities of WWII. Piotr Florczyk has the reverence and skill to bring Swir into English verse with crystalline witness and warnings." -Katie Ford"These short poems by Anna Swir, keenly translated by Piotr Florczyk, have the urgency and clarity of a poet staring back at a burning building from which she somehow escaped, except the building is Poland and she is looking back in memory, talking to its war-torn corpses, and to us, the lucky recipients of these explosive poems." -Edward HirschThis collection includes Piotr Florczyk's striking new translations of Anna Swir, featuring the best of her poems about the Warsaw Uprising, as well as poems that focus on the human body and Swir's experiences of love and family.