Pigtail

Visiting the museum in Oświęcim became a direct impulse to write this song. Place, where everyone can find out with their own eyes, what a man is able to do to another man, how low may fall, even deprive yourself of the elementary attributes of humanity, exceed the unimaginable limits of evil, crime. There are two time plans in Tadeusz Różewicz's poem. The first is the period of the war, hard work of the death factory, which was the concentration camp in Oświęcim. The women murdered then were shaved, Hair was collected, was collected on huge piles. Currently – This is the second one, contemporary plan – They lie in glass showcases, testifying to the animal of German Nazis. They are dead, like women, which they once were a decoration, they remain only frozen, tragic souvenir:

They don't x -ray their light
the wind does not separate
their hand does not touch them
neither rain nor lips

Millions of innocent people were killed in Oświęcim, The enormity of extermination makes them a bit anonymous, they are part of the terrifying statistics combined by historians, not poets. The lyrical subject of the analyzed poem pays attention to one, For most visitors the museum trivial, Detail of the exhibition: gray braid mouse tail with ribbon. He gets him from anonimal masses of similar, terrifying exhibits, It resembles a unit drama of a Jewish child, as if it makes his destruction ends up. Always a specific death of man is more poignant than dry numbers talking about hundreds of thousands of killed.

The braid is seemingly objective, dry report, almost documentary note, Hookless record of images observed in Oświęcim. A cool story practically deprived of any artistic means, Written in a colloquial language. Is it, Despite this severity (Or maybe thanks to her), poem, extremely expressive. Similar simplicity, clarity, Readability is the basis of the great poetic art of Tadeusz Różewicz.