PAUL POLANSKY
One of the pitfalls of editing a literary journal is that out of the poets and writers you meet, 99 percent of them spend 99 percent of their time whining about their love lives. Eventually, the sensitivities are blunted until you reach the point where you pull the covers over your head at the slightest hint of another human being's pain. Then you encounter a writer like Paul Polansky. And God help you if you ignore him.
Mr. Polansky's stock-in-trade is genocide-specifically, the fight against the systematic efforts to exterminate the Roma (also known as Gypsies) in Eastern Europe. In his poetry collections Living Through It Twice, The River Killed My Brother, and Not a Refugee, Mr. Polansky carefully delineates the atrocities of Czechs, Slovaks, Albanians, and others (even NATO and the UN are not innocent here) against the Roma. "Art" is tossed to the winds -- don't look for the little niceties such as form, meter, or rhyme in these poems. What remains is the raw power of the darker side of the human psyche -- fear, hatred, grief, loss, violence, torture, and an ever-dimming hope of compassion and rescue. But perhaps that was the point of "Art" in the first place.
Mr. Polansky is a native of Mason City, Iowa. In his undergraduate days, Mr. Polansky opted to spend his junior year at Madrid University, which became the beginning of a lifetime odyssey through Europe, an odyssey which led him to become one of the most sought-after writer-lecturers concerning Eastern European human rights issues for our time. His other books include The Storm, a novel; Stray Dog (Poems of a Fighting Freak), a paeon to, or rather against, the violence in boxing; and Black Silence and The Gypsies of Kosovo (non-fiction).
Paul Polansky's writings have a way of waking you up at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat. They can also reawaken the most dormant social conscience. So don't say I didn't warn you.
Robert Dunn, Executive Editor Medicinal Purposes Literary Review New York
LATEST NEWS
Paul's latest poetry reading tour across Italy during October 09 promoting his new book Undefeated was a success, covering more than 12 cities. Below is a link in pdf format of the Italian press stories about the tour:
N-LEADED BLOOD is fully downloadable now as a .pdf document. Please right click on the link below and select "Save Target As" to download:
Lety novel implicates foreign affairs minister
Author Polansky says Schwarzenberg's family solicited
labor camp
By Markéta Hulpachová
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
May 21st, 2008 issue
Polansky learned of the atrocities of Lety while
tracing his roots.
What does the foreign affairs minister have in common
with a hunchback who died 40 years ago?American writer
and historian Paul Polansky says both men’s families’
lives were affected by Lety, a south Bohemian
concentration camp where hundreds of Romany prisoners
perished during World War II.In his recently
republished novel The Storm, Polansky accuses the
aristocratic parents of Foreign Affairs Minister Karel
Schwarzenberg of soliciting the camp’s construction
near their estate and using the prisoners as a cheap
labor source.Narrated through the eyes of the
hunchback Václav Lùzum, a south Bohemian farmer whose
Romany wife and children died in Auschwitz after being
transported there from Lety in 1943, the novel uses
fictional names to depict the stories of real-life
characters. While the 1999 first edition shields the
Schwarzenbergs under a pseudonym, the new edition
purposely reveals the family’s identity in the
epilogue.“I want the book to be a personal challenge
to Schwarzenberg,” Polansky said. “His father used
Jewish slave labor prior to forced administration. He
can sue me if it’s not true.”According to Polansky,
the story of the concentration camp begins in 1939,
months before Hitler occupied the Czech lands. That
December, a blizzard decimated more than 1,000
hectares (2,470 acres) of forest owned by Karel
Schwarzenberg VI — the father of the current
minister.“That snowstorm in 1939 would have bankrupted
Schwarzenberg,” Polansky said. “He was the poor man of
all the Schwarzenbergs — he had nothing except those
woods.”In the early years of the war, the
German-controlled Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
remained under Czech administration, while, based on
German directives, the construction of local labor
camps was administered by the Czech government. “At
one point, there were 197 work camps in the Czech
lands,” Polansky said.To obtain cheap laborers to
clear the forest of destroyed trees, the
Schwarzenbergs contacted the Interior Ministry and
requested that one of the camps be built near their
estate, said Polansky.Initially, the men who worked in
the Lety camp were “petty criminals and work-shy men”
overseen by guards and housed in nearby villages.By
fall 1940 — nearly two years before the Schwarzenberg
estate came under forced administration by the Nazis —
the government began transporting Jewish prisoners to
the camp. “The Czech government was following the
instructions of the Germans, who wanted the Jews
worked to death,” Polansky said.Because most of the
imprisoned Jews were doctors, lawyers and other
members of the intelligentsia, they proved ineffective
as laborers. “Eventually, the Jews were sent to the
Terezín ghetto, then to Auschwitz,” Polansky said. To
attain a more effective labor source, the
Schwarzenbergs requested that Romany workers be sent
to Lety, he added.In the following years, Czech police
rounded up thousands of Roma and sent them to Lety,
where they were overseen by what he described as
sadistic guards and housed in inhumane conditions. In
1943, a typhus epidemic struck the Lety camp, claiming
hundreds of lives. Under German orders, the camp was
shut down, the remaining prisoners transported to
Auschwitz.Even before the typhus outbreak, however,
hundreds of Romany prisoners — including children —
were drowned, starved or beaten to death, Polansky
said.Unearthing the truthThe dark history of the Lety
camp first came to Polansky’s attention in 1991, when
he visited the area to trace his family history. While
searching in the archive in the south Bohemian town of
Tøeboò, he came across a bombshell.“The documents
showed that there had been a concentration camp in
Lety, and that everyone there died of typhus,” he
said. “This immediately raised a red flag, because
this is the excuse the Germans used when they sent
prisoners to death camps. I immediately wondered if
there were any survivors.”Polansky says his first
steps led to President Václav Havel’s office, where he
was told there were no living survivors. Unsatisfied
with this response, Polansky initiated his own search.
“I hired a Gypsy driver, and we visited all the
[Romany] ghettos in the Czech Republic,” he said. “We
found hundreds of survivors, and nearly all of them
said they had been corresponding with [the
president’s] office, unsuccessfully seeking
compensation.”According to Polansky, the path to
disclosing the truth about Lety was full of such
anomalies.Cool receptionWhen the first edition of The
Storm appeared in Prague bookstores in 1999, the novel
disappeared from the shelves in a matter of weeks.
“Although all my previous books had been well reviewed
by the Prague press, no Czech newspaper or literary
magazine reviewed The Storm,” said Polansky. “Weeks
after publication, it was difficult to obtain a copy.
Rumor has it that a Czech nobleman bought up all the
books in both Czech and English.”The minister
distances himself from Polansky’s
allegations.“Schwarzenberg read the original version
of Polansky’s book. The first edition contained
several basic errors and false information. This
information about Lety is just another example,” says
Foreign Affairs Ministry spokeswoman Zuzana
Opletalová. “Schwarzenberg understands that Polansky
probably needs to make himself visible, but he will
not take part in it.”Other politicians, including
Senator Petr Pithart, who expressed interest in
Polansky’s research of the Lety case in the 1990s, are
less dismissive.Standing at the mass graves near the
Lety camp during a recent commemoration, Pithart said
Polansky’s allegations were to be taken seriously.
“[Polansky] discovered the whole thing when he was
researching his genealogy. He’s not just some
scandal-monger,” he said. “I have great respect for
Karel Schwarzenberg, and I know he loved and idolized
his father very much. But, if what Polansky says is
true, [Schwarzenberg] will have to come up with a way
to make peace with his past.”
Markéta Hulpachová can be reached at
mhulpachova@praguepost.com