Building the Barricade

(Paperback)

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Building the Barricade, is a seminal collection of poetry of witness. Building the Barricade is a lyric account of the sixty-three day Warsaw uprising. Caught between German occupation and the advancing Soviets, the Polish Resistance Home Army barricaded central Warsaw in hopes of liberating the city and gaining Polish sovereignty. wirszczyska joined the Polish Resistance movement as a military nurse during the Uprising. This is her first-person account of the atrocities that destroyed over 60% of the Polish capital and left over 100,000 civilians and 16,000 Polish resistance fighters dead.

wirszczyska wrote: Life in Warsaw during the Uprising was a nightmare. The city was deprived of water, electricity, gas, and food supplies. For the most part, the sewer system did not function; the hospitals had no medicines or clean water. Day and night German bombers raged over the capital, burying the living beneath the rubble.

Author Bio

Anna wirszczyska was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1909. She attended Warsaw University where she studied medieval and baroque Polish literature. She began publishing poems in the 1930s. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, wirszczyska joined the Polish Resistance and was a military nurse during the Warsaw Uprising. Anna wirszczyska died in Krakow of cancer in 1984. Piotr Florczyk is the author of East & West, a volume of poems, Barefoot, a chapbook of poems, and Los Angeles Sketchbook, a collection of brief essays and photographs. He has also translated several books of Polish poetry. He teaches global literary studies at the University of Washington, Seattle.