Building The Barricade And Other Poems

Building the Barricade, is a seminal collection of poetry of witness. Building the Barricade is a lyric account of the sixty-three day Warsaw uprising. Caught between German occupation and the advancing Soviets, the Polish Resistance Home Army barricaded central Warsaw in hopes of liberating the city and gaining Polish sovereignty. Świrszczyńska joined the Polish Resistance movement as a military nurse during the Uprising. This is her first-person account of the atrocities that destroyed over 60% of the Polish capital and left over 100,000 civilians and 16,000 Polish resistance fighters dead. Świrszczyńska wrote: "Life in Warsaw during the Uprising was a nightmare. The city was deprived of water, electricity, gas, and food supplies. For the most part, the sewer system did not function; the hospitals had no medicines or clean water. Day and night German bombers raged over the capital, burying the living beneath the rubble."