Kraków Testimonies is a British, chapbook-length edition of some of the poems that were first published in the U.S. in the volume From the Annals of Krakow. The collection includes eighteen poems selected and, in some cases, edited by Jean Boase-Beier. Arc Publications, 2021

“What happened to Kraków’s Jews? The poet Piotr Florczyk, who was born in Kraków, set himself the task of finding out, and to this end listened to recorded testimonies of Holocaust survivors from Kraków at the Visual History Archive during a period of research study at the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation Centre. In the poems collected here, Florczyk retells the stories of these survivors for a new audience, exploring their interactions with their surroundings, their families, their neighbours and their oppressors. Thus there emerges, through the work of the poet as story-teller, not only a shared history of Kraków but, for the reader, a sense of those voices that might otherwise be forgotten, speaking again in poems of extraordinary clarity and simplicity.”

—Publisher’s description