Grzegorz Kwiatkowski performing at the home of Kris O'Shee and Alan Cheuse
The idea of not being forgotten – is very important to me. Not the most important, but important. Something like: I lived, I existed, I also felt, remember me. And by implication and with an addition from me: try to live better so that crimes do not happen as they did during the Second World War.
-Grzegorz Kwiatkowski
I met Kwiatkowski over a series of events in September and October of 2025, as he traveled in the US with the Cheuse Center at George Mason University and Yale University. Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is the Cheuse Center’s Visiting Writer from Poland, and the center is collaborating with him on a series of events that mark the tenth anniversary of the Cheuse Center, founded in 2016. The center was named after Alan Cheuse, whose father was a Jewish refugee to America, from Stalin’s Russia (now Ukraine).
2025 Cheuse Fellow Katey Funderburgh & the writer Chris Baah
I read Kwiatkowski’s book ‘Crops’ in the run up to the Cheuse Center’s International Writers Festival in the Fall of 2025, which focuses on international writers and the art of translation. ‘Crops’ is a chilling book and ties into his body of work on many levels, tackling profound themes of violence, genocide, and human rights –survivors, victims and perpetrators come to life almost entirely in their own words.
Here is the title poem, ‘Crops’:
“our real work is farm work
not killing
although I admit:
the massacres in the swamps have the rhythm of our seasonal labor
and when the rains were heavy we did not go out for crops”
Kwiatkowksi and his friends Jim McGuinn from WXFM and his wife, academic Christine Weeks, from Philadelphia,
talk with Roman Kostovski, publisher of Plamen Press
In a response to an interview in PEN, Kwiatkowski explains this decision to write from multiple perspectives:
I think that the moral scandal of crimes and tragedies is visible especially when we see not only victims but also perpetrators and observers. These three perspectives are crucial to see a kind of genocide landscape, to make it more visible. This terror, this obscenity, this cruelty, this violence. Of course this is rather the art of trying, not succeeding. I guess there is no way to really understand it. But I would like to come as close as possible to this tragedy to understand my family roots and the roots of my wife’s family, and because of that to understand myself—who I am and why I act and feel in one way or another.
Preserving historic memory is particularly important to him because he notices how, even till this day, families hide their Jewish heritage in Poland. He tells a story of his wife’s grandmother who was shaken to be asked about her Jewish past. Apparently, she had hidden in the woods during WWII. “Everyone hid in the woods,” she said indignantly, when asked about the War. These sorts of personal stories often finds their way into Kwiatkowski’s presentation of his work, making him a magnetic story teller. But he is also an activist who helped uncover nearly half a million pairs of shoes left to decay near the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland. Kwiatkowski has been fighting for the site to be preserved and recognized officially as a site of memory.
In Dr Berger's African American studies class
Art is a critical mirror. It offers us an opportunity to see our sins, transgressions, and things we had no idea about but they were there, repressed and dressed in beautiful clothes.
In my journey through the poems in ‘Crops’, one of the things I noticed was the everyday human characteristics of the speakers. Maybe when we think of violence, we think that the violence does away with ordinary human characteristics. But the truth is possibly that in every violent actor, is an ordinary human. Take for example a wife, as seen in Kwiatkowski ‘Margarete Hauptmann’, who grieves her husband Gerhart Hauptmann, a Nobel Prize–winning author, who collaborated in some ways with Nazi Germany. In her reverence I also see awareness,
“his voice calling everyone to order / even cows and beasts of the field feared him,” just like in the poem ‘Whistling’ where the killers whistle tunes during their "work." It makes me wonder if violence, like most things, is a conscious decision?
Dallas Hudgens, who first encountered Kwiatkowski's work, and then introduced him to Leeya Mehta, the Director of the Cheuse Center, tells me that one of the things he noticed is the care Kwiatkowski takes in preserving the memory & history of the lives in Stutthof. In the Day of Translation event held on 30th September 2025 at Gillespie Gallery at George Mason University, the audience laughed after Kwiatkowski mentioned how his knack for unearthing things was honed by his mother, who he said, told many lies. He said this in an answer to the question about the impact this much care for stories like these had on him.
Kwiatkowksi and Cheuse Director, Leeya Mehta
Mehta adds, “When LaNitra Berger and Dallas Hudgens told me about Kwiatkowski’s way of approaching the Holocaust from the perspective of all the actors, in the same book, I was intrigued. Kwiatkowski’s work creates opportunities for us to examine how bad things can get if we sleepwalk through our lives. By using simple language and black humor, he approaches taboo subjects at unique angles. Ninety percent of the personas in Kwiatkowski’s poems are speaking in their own words. Words that make the killing of other human beings seem ordinary. It reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s controversial thesis about the banality of evil. Kwiatkowski is a writer in a series of writers that will be exploring the period around the Second World War through the eyes of these different actors.”
She explains, “As Cheuse approaches its tenth year in 2026, I wanted to explore ideas that speak to our better angels. Alan Cheuse’s own father, who fled Stalin’s Russia, came from what is now Ukraine. On April 24th 2026 we hope to discuss Kwiatkowski’s work in conversation with German writer Malte Herwig, whose grandfather was one of the first German soldiers who occupied Poland. Kwiatkowski himself is of a complex Polish Jewish and German heritage, which he talks about. The idea that exercising religious and cultural freedom is a risk to some groups of people is a theme we are exploring through this year.”
Audience members include venerated newspaperman Clarence Page,
with Elisabeth Vermilye and Cheuse Board Chair, William Miller
Mehta illuminates many of the threads that tie the year together. Even Olufemi Terry, whose debut novel was presented by the center on October 19, 2025, draws on German, Creole and African perspectives in ways that makes anew our view of the past. (Terry is a Sierra Leonian born writer and Caine Prize winner, and speaks to William Miller about these perspectives in a podcast episode on his novel ‘Wilderness of Mirrors’. )
On November 6 2025 the center featured a novel about the Jewish conversos of Spain, by Linda Chavez, in conversation with Doritt Carroll, whose fourth book is ‘The Convert’. Mehta says:
By curating across the year, we build on themes to deepen our own humanity. For me this story is also personal, because my ancestors were refugees, and I am interested in people that seek sanctuary and those who provide it. Who are these ‘ironic points of light,’ like in Auden’s poem September 1, 1939, who operate around the world? A kind of underground railroad for ideas and people, building stories of sanctuary, risking their lives, those that don’t sleepwalk through history.
There have been times when Kwiatkowski has been persona-nongrata in Poland because he has decided to explore the failings of a country, its complicated past, as it lies between Germany and Russia. He fears that in this era, we are still very close to killing each other. No one is clearly moral, so he has to continue his advocacy. The West Virginia writer Randi Ward, whom Kwiatkowski shared a panel with at the event, reiterated that, “it is important to advocate for your story.”
Cheuse founding board member, and Director of Creative Writing at George Washington University, writer Lisa Page
For LaNitra Berger, professor at George Mason and Director of African and African American Studies, it was important for Kwiatkowski to attend her African American Studies class and to share the parallels of history with her students. Kwiatkowski read his poems to her class:
We discussed racial violence and public memorials, very relevant subjects for both the South, here in America, and for Grzegorz who is laboring to preserve the memory of the Holocaust in Poland. We all walked to the Enslaved People of George Mason memorial and took a tour.
Dr LaNitra Berger and Kwiatkowksi at George Mason's EPGM memorial
John Bradley in his review of Grzegorz Kwiatkowski's ‘Crops’ mentions that "the poems offer no false hope, no sentimentality, only a directness, a desire to confront the horror of the Holocaust and the way we have used language as padding, to protect us from the horror."
Kwiatkowksi's riveting performance of his poems
In a small event hosted by the Cheuse Center at the home of Alan Cheuse’s widow, Kris O’Shee, Kwiatkowski confirms that the poems are a reflection of the real world—not poetry that judges, but poetry that focuses on showing an aspect, a perspective of the world, like a journal or an interview can. For example, we meet ‘Walter Stier.’ Walter Stier was a German railway official who worked for the Reichsbahn (the German National Railway) during World War II — he was not a member of the SS or the Gestapo, but he held an administrative position within the system that facilitated the deportation of Jews to extermination camps.
2025 Cheuse Fellow Katey Funderburgh, Alice Magelssen-Green, Assoc. Director of Watershed Lit, and
Brittany Kerfoot, board member & co-founder of Generation Women DC
In another poem, Stier's son, answering for his father's deeds, repeats a ‘good’ work ethic, oblivious of everything else.
“Isn't it true that people who do ‘bad’ things always think they're doing the ‘right’ thing,” Kwiatkowski asks? They are a polyphony of voices of real people, with real names. Kwiatkowski explains, as he reads ‘Ranger Danze,’ aloud.
“during the war we laid out bodies like wood
but after the war we laid out wood in the forest
like bodies freshly felled”
Kwiatkowksi with Randi Ward, acclaimed writer and translator, on Day of Translation at George Mason
The event was at Gillespie Gallery, and surrounded by the exhibition, Before the Americas
Peter Cole, a famed translator and writer from Yale, who was the keynote speaker for the 2025 Day of Translation on September 30th says:
to translate is to find the word in my English that'll give a similar experience.
When I write to Peter Constantine, the translator of Grzegorz Kwiatkowski’s ‘Crops’, he also mentions that his aim was to have his translations have the same “stark, distilled, clear, & haunting” form as the Polish versions do. We find a kind of density in Grzegorz’s poems, perhaps, rightly so for the subject he explores. Even in his new collection in progress, he brings this density, this horror. A butcher in 'Crops' says:
"Killing people? No. It was the killing of animals in human form.”
***
Kwiatkowski will return on April 24, 2026 to be in conversation with Malte Herwig as part of Cheuse@10 at the Goethe Institute in Washington DC. You can learn more about this by signing up for the newsletter at: https://cheusecenter.gmu.edu/subscribe#
***
Chris Baah is a Ghanaian-Nigerian writer who creates under the name I Echo. He is the Founding Curator of NENTA Literary Journal, where he also serves as a Poetry Curator. He is studying for an MFA at George Mason University, where he serves as an Editorial Assistant with Poetry Daily and an interviewer and features writer for the Cheuse Center.
Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is a distinguished Polish poet, musician, academic, and human rights activist. He is the Fortunoff Video Archive Artist-in-Residence in 2025 at Yale University. Kwiatkowski has earned international recognition for both his poetry and his activism. His literary works, including the acclaimed collection ‘Crops’, tackle profound themes of violence, genocide, and human rights. Translated by Peter Constantine, ‘Crops’has been published in the United States, and beyond.
The Cheuse Center gives special thanks to Mason Exhibitions, our designer Kevin Jones, photographer Nancy Kiang, Busboys and Poets, The Middle East Institute, AAAS, and the Mason English department and MFA. Thanks also to our salon host Kris O'Shee and to our supporters for the Cheuse@10 Challenge.
November 05, 2025