Voz, a poetry collection by the Polish poet, musician, and activist Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, continues the poetic project of exploring the memory of the Holocaust, already familiar to Slovenian readers through his collections Žetev ('Harvest') and Brez orkestra ('Without an Orchestra'). Once again, Kwiatkowski builds a powerful testimony to antisemitism, the Holocaust, and its aftermath from the words of survivors, witnesses, and participants. Voices from different places and circumstances come together to form a multilayered narrative of a world gradually descending into exclusion, violence, and destruction. Through fragments of memory, the banality of violence and the mechanisms of social exclusion are laid bare. From recollections stripped almost entirely of literary ornament, Kwiatkowski creates poetry whose documentary immediacy makes it all the more haunting and affecting. The title, Voz ('cart' or 'wagon'), alludes to a fragmented word appearing in one of the testimonies that inspired the collection.
In 2025 and 2026, Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is an artist-in-residence at Yale University and the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. The book Voz is based entirely on material from the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, one of the first and most important video archives of testimonies from Holocaust survivors and witnesses.
paperback 12 × 18 cm 76 pages
Keywords
Holocaust | Kwiatkowski, Grzegorz | poetry | Polish literature