The Editors

Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry

Dear Sirs,

In Polin volume 13 Joanna Rostropowicz Clark published an article, ‘Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński: A Poet-Hero’. The theses of the article and the material used to exemplify them are well known and came from my work on Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński. I published them in Aneks (London), volume 22 (1979), and discussed them at more length in my Szkło bolesne, obraz dni (Uppsala, 1991). I dealt there with the taboo on the discussion of the Jewish origins of the most outstanding poet of the Polish underground and, in particular, his feelings of solidarity with the murdered Jews.

It is on these topics that Joanna Rostropowicz Clark has written. I should have been happy that she has taken up this theme and made use of my work, but I am not, since she failed to provide the source of her knowledge and quotations. It is difficult to imagine that without my work Ms Rostropowicz Clark would have turned her attention to the Jewish motifs in Baczyński's work. Moreover, her article does not add anything significant to what I had already set out.

The author had already written on this subject in Teksty drugie (Warsaw), when she also failed to mention my name. I pointed this out to her. She wrote that she had been in the wrong, that she regretted this, and that she would correct this in the reprint. As is evident from the present case, she has not done so.

My 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. It has been the subject of unrestrained attacks, which have continued until today. For this reason, the appropriation of the results of my work is clearly something that I resent.