After the After: (Re)imagining Holocaust Testimonies as Poetry

This podcast features a lecture by Piotr Florczyk, poet, essayist, translator, and professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, on the poetry of witness. This form of poetic expression testifies to extreme historical and social events—war, political persecution, exile, and even the horrors of torture and censorship.

In his talk, delivered last week in Antwerp, Florczyk explored the unique burden of the twentieth century, a time marked by unimaginable atrocities. As the number of survivors from its darkest moments, including the Holocaust, continues to dwindle, the risk of these events fading from collective memory grows. Florczyk asked: Can contemporary poets and writers engage with tragedies they know only from history books? If so, what should guide their approach? And how can they navigate accusations of exploiting or aestheticizing someone else’s suffering?

These urgent questions were at the core of Florczyk’s thought-provoking lecture, hosted by the Institute for Jewish Studies (University of Antwerp) and the Forum on Central and Eastern Europe (KU Leuven), with the support of the Polish Institute in Brussels.