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This chapter highlights Holocaust poetry in Poland and Hungary. The Holocaust was a subject for most Polish poets after the war. Outrage over the mass killings of Polish Jews was voiced by Antoni Słonimski, who spent the war in exile in England and France; the non-Jewish Władysław Broniewski, whose wife Maria died in Auschwitz; and Tadeusz Różewicz, who was a soldier in the Home Army during the German occupation. Meanwhile, the great majority of Hungarian Jews were assimilated and the Holocaust was a greater shock for them than for their Polish counterparts. The losses of Hungarian Jewry in the period 1941 to 1945 included many writers and poets killed in the last months of 1944 or early 1945, among them Miklós Radnóti. Apart from Radnóti at least five other published Hungarian Jewish poets or poets of Jewish extraction lost their lives in the Holocaust. While most Hungarian readers are familiar with Radnóti's life and death, it is a non-Jewish poet whose poems constitute a central part of the Holocaust canon: János Pilinszky. In the early 1960s, the Holocaust re-emerged in the poetry of the next generation.

This chapter examines an exchange between Józef Lewandowski and Joanna Rostropowicz Clark. In Lewandowski's letter, he argues that Clark failed to credit him as 'the source of her knowledge and quotations' in her article, 'Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński: A Poet-Hero'. Lewandowski goes on to describe how his 'work on Baczyński was the product of many years' work, and its publication encountered strong resistance from people who were important in the Polish opposition of those days, who could not swallow the idea that the poet of the underground should have shown solidarity with the murdered Jews'. For that reason, Lewandowski resents the appropriation of the results of his work. In response to Lewandowski, Clark apologizes in her letter, but contends that the inspiration for her own essay did not come from Lewandowski's work, but from Natan Gross's book Poeci i Szoa. Nevertheless, Clark says that 'the full credit of being the first unbiased reader of Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński belongs to Józef Lewandowski'.

This chapter focuses on poet Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński. Before the cycle of the trauma of the Nazi occupation's horror, already in the spring of 1941 Baczyński had written a few remarkable poems testifying to his shock at what everybody had seen. Baczyński can be identified as a representative and forerunner of ‘generational catastrophism’, as opposed to ‘historiosophic catastrophism’. Ultimately, Polish poets writing and publishing their booklets of poems during the occupation in clandestine publishing houses used allusion and silence not just as a means of expression, but also as a precaution. The circle of their readers, a few thousand strong, who every day were in contact with the same truths, understood every metaphor and every ellipse. The poems that were closest to these truths-facts were most often copied, recited among friends and in prison cells.

This chapter describes Tomas Venclova's Aleksander Wat: Life and Art of an Iconoclast. Aleksander Wat was much more than a prominent Polish poet of Jewish origin; he was a paradigmatic twentieth-century intellectual who claimed an illustrious cultural lineage that included King David, Rashi, and Isaac Luria. A ‘born futurist’, he was also a communist fellow traveller in inter-war Poland, one who later became a Soviet prisoner, and on his return to Poland was an open anti-communist. Both his background and experiences placed him at the centre of major artistic currents and historical trends. Thus, in his writings one can find a reflection of virtually everything important that occurred in Europe between 1914 and his death in 1967 and even after.