Jacek Kaczmarski

Origins and early life

Jacek Kaczmarski was born in Warsaw on 22 March 1957, the son of two painters, Janusz Kaczmarski and Anna Trojanowska-Kaczmarska; his mother was born in 1931 into a Polish-Jewish family and survived the German occupation as a hidden child, and her mother, Felicja Trojanowska, born Szlachtaub, a schoolteacher at Falenica, was Jewish — the grandmother on whom this fiche rests, whose family was almost entirely murdered in the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, and whose daughter later bore witness in the collection Children of the Holocaust Speak.

Work and career

Raised in the artistic intelligentsia of Warsaw and trained in Polish literature at the university, he discovered Vysotsky, Brassens and the ballad. In 1978, at twenty-one, wrote to a melody by the Catalan singer Lluís Llach the song that made him the voice of a generation: 'Mury', 'Walls' — 'pull the bars from the walls, break the chains, smash the whip' — which the shipyard workers of Gdańsk sang in 1980 and which became, against the poet's own ironic intent, the anthem of Solidarity.

When martial law was declared in December 1981 he was on tour in the West; he stayed, and for twelve years his songs reached Poland from Radio Free Europe in Munich, where he broadcast until 1994, hundreds of ballads that argued with Polish history, retold Bruegel and Rembrandt, mocked the tyrants and the dissidents alike and made him, in exile, the most listened-to poet in the language.

Later years

He returned to a free Poland, toured without pause, wrote novels and poems, and died of cancer of the throat in Gdańsk on 10 April 2004, at forty-seven; his songs were sung again in the streets of Warsaw and Minsk in the protests of the decades that followed.