"From the Abyss" – Collection of Resistance Poems Written under Nazi Occupation, Published by the Underground ...

"From the Abyss" – Collection of Resistance Poems Written under Nazi Occupation, Published by the Underground Organization "Jewish National Committee" – Warsaw, 1944 – First Publication of the Poem "Campo de' Fiori " by Czesław Miłosz
Z otchłani, poezje [From the Abyss, Poems]. Warsaw: Ż. K. N. ("Jewish National Committee"), 1944. Polish.
"From the Abyss", published about a year after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, is a rare expression of resistance to the Nazi regime and its crimes in the Jewish ghetto and outside of it. The eleven poems in the book were printed anonymously and their writers' identity was revealed only after the liberation of Poland by the Red Army – Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz, literary scholar Jan Kott, Jewish poets Mieczysław Jastrun and Michal Borwicz, and others. The editor of the collection is, presumably, the poet Tadeusz Sarnecki, a member of Żegota, the underground Polish Council to Aid Jews, who wrote the last poem in the book and was the only one who signed it with a pseudonym – Jan Wajdelota.
The publisher, "Jewish National Committee" (Żydowski Komitet Narodowy), was an underground organization founded in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942. It served as the "political arm" of the Jewish Fighting Organization ŻOB and was responsible for its contact with the resistance outside the ghetto. This book, published about a year after the Jewish military resistance was repressed, was smuggled from Europe to the USA and printed in New York when the war was still raging, under the title "Ghetto Poetry of the Jewish Underground in Poland" (Polish: Poezje ghetta z podziemia żydowskiego w Polsce; published by Association of Friends of our Tribune, 1945).
One of the better-known poems in this book is "Campo de' Fiori" by Czesław Miłosz – one of the greatest poets of the 20th century and a Nobel Laureate in literature (1980). The poem describes the indifference of the masses in face of two historical atrocities – the burning at the stake of the Italian scientist Giordano Bruno in Campo de' Fiori and the crushing of the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto by the German army: "the people of Rome or Warsaw / haggle, laugh, make love / as they pass by the martyrs' pyres" (Translation: David Brooks and Louis Iribarne).
23 pp, approx. 14 cm. Good condition. Minor creases. Stains to cover and first leaf. Top edge trimmed at a slant.