In episode #15 I talk with writer Magdalena Zurawski about her research into her great-grandfather, Czeslaw Kowalczyk’s, story. Arrested by the Nazi’s during the Warsaw Uprising, he was taken to a concentration camp. Magdalena spent 2022-23 on a Fulbright Scholarship in Warsaw, tracking what happened next and growing obsessed with twentieth-century avant-garde Polish writer Miron Białoszewski. We discuss the uprising, which led to the Nazi destruction of Warsaw and the killing of 250,000 Polish people in just two months. We also discuss the earlier Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the burning of the ghetto that followed. Where do history and the imagination meet? What is the nature of truth? And how can you get older Polish women to talk to you on buses? Maggie reads from her powerful (and very funny) work-in-progress.People and histories mentioned and discussedMiron Białoszewski, Poems and SongMiron Bialoszewski, A Memoir of the Warsaw UprisingThe Warsaw Ghetto UprisingThe Warsaw UprisingCzeslaw Milosz, Campo dei FioriIlya Kaminsky, We Lived Happily During the War—Original music by Benjamin Roberts: [email protected]

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