Holocaust and Gypsy Culture

We met to see the movie Papusza.

Dr Dariusz Zieba made the introduce.

Bronisława Wajs, or Papusza – the Gypsy poet who wrote in the language of the Roma. She came from the Polska Roma ethnic group, the Polish lowland Roma. Born in Lublin on the 17th of August 1908 or the 30th of May 1910, she died on the 8th of February 1987 in Inowrocław.

Life on the road

The caravan in which Bronisława Wajs was born and raised wandered the territories of Podole, Wołyń and the areas neighboring Vilinus. The Wajs family consisted mainly of musicians and harpists. They traveled the towns and villages, and played at inns, fairs and weddings.

Her future was decided on the third night after her birth. The gypsies say that it is at that time a spirit appeared and listed all the good and bad that would be her part. Gave warnings. The mother expected this visit, and was afraid, so that night she was accompanied by an old woman from her tribe. The words of the spirit, they could not repeat to anyone. They only whispered: 'She'll either bring great honor or great shame'. They took the girls from the forest to the village and had her baptized. But in the tabor no one called her 'Bronka'. They used 'super-beautiful'. Because of her beauty they called her Papusza, which in the Roma language means 'doll'

The poet to be was one of the few Roma women who learned to read and write by herself. She never went to school. Bronisława was arranged to be married at age 16 to her stepfather's brother – a man 25 years her senior, the harpist Dionizy Wajs. During the Second World War she and her group hid from the Germans in the forests of Western Ukraine. After the war the Polish Gypsies from the east moved to the Regained Lands, it was the same with Papusza's group. Of the winter of 1950, the poet later recalled:

We went alone, the children peeped from under the duvets and sang carols. Christmas Eve we stayed over night in a beautiful forest; they flung aside the snow, started a fire; both young and old sang carols by the fire, and roasted potatoes because there was nothing else to eat, two weeks on the road. That year, strange it was, ominous and ill-fated. Mommie'd gone ahead by train, brother went whither, sister elsewhere. The whole caravan, six wagons, crawled forward; we had no holy wafer that year.

After years of wandering with the caravans, she settled in Żagań in 1950. For the longest period, the years between 1954-1981, she lived in Gorzów Wielkopolski, when the Romani caravan stopped for good. In 1981, old and sick, the poet was taken into care by a family from Inowrocław.

In the Romani community she met with disdain, because she had abandoned the traditional female role. Rejected because of her infertility, accused of revealing tribal secrets, she was finally cast out from the community. These persecutions caused mental disorders, and forced her into periodic psychiatric treatments.

Poetry

In 1949 the caravan of Dionizy Wajs was joined by Jerzy Ficowski, a runaway from persecutions of the secret police, who was fascinated by gypsy customs and language. 'That's Bronka Wajs, the wife of the gray guy with the mustache, Papusza they call'er, she puts together the Gypsy songs, a poet!”- he heard. He quickly noticed the literary value of the improvised songs by Bronisława, and convinced her to start noting them down.

The beginning of the relations of Papusza and Ficowski coincided with a critical moment for Polish Gypsies – the time of the government-imposed settlement injunction. Thus, the lost world of freedom and Gypsy caravans became a natural motif for the Romani poet. In her poetry, which grows out of the Gypsy folk-song tradition, she describes the fate of her nation, expressed its habits and yearnings. Her poems, lacking regular rhythm, sometimes border on tale telling. Her debut was a poem, translated from Romani in the publication Nowa Kultura in 1951. The first translated drafts Ficowski sent to Julian Tuwim who in turn contributed to its publishing.

After the publishing of her 1951 collection The Songs of Papusza, she became famous. However she still lived a modest life, telling fortunes to provide for herself, her sick husband, and a boy she took in, whom she dubbed Tarzan. When Tuwim heard of her material situation, he solicited royalties for her poems, and later an artist scholarship, the poet however demurred taking them: "Don't be angry with me, cause I'm no learned person to take prices". She never thought it possible to take money for writing songs.

Papusza never learned to write properly. Ficowski had to decipher her quickly written, unclear scripts, which were full mistakes and words that lacked whole syllables. But because he did not want to discourage her from writing he never asked for help in clearing up the uncertainties.

All of Papusza's literary work are about forty handwritten poems. She left a few compositions in prose which described gypsy life. The piece which is considered the best, and was held in high esteem by Tuwim is Gypsy Song Taken From Papusza's Head

From 1962 Papusza belonged to the Polish Literary Union. Her poems were translated into German, English, French, Spanish, Swedish and Italian.

"Falorykta" or Punishment

The mysterious word 'falorykta' in the Romani language means a sentence, a condemning, a punishment for revealing secrets to people from outside of the gypsy culture. Papusza feared rejection by the gypsies, thus she never spoke of herself as a poet, but only as a fortune teller.

In the post-war years in the Polska Roma community there was a rigorous ban on giving aliens any information on Romani traditions, rites, taboos and language. After the publishing of Polish Gypsies, in which Ficowski described their beliefs, moral code and added a small dictionary of important Romani phrases, the community elders accused the author's friend, Papusza, of treason.

The accusations from her brethren, along with threats of pulling her apart with horses, often backed by violence, made the poet collapse into mental illness. However she never made a negative judgment on Ficowski's decision to publish her poetry. She still held him as her closest friend, and in her letters, she called him Little Brother, or Pszałoro. In 1999, on occasion of receiving the Man of the Borderland title, Ficowski would reminiscent on the entrance into the hermetic and distrustful Gypsy community.

The poet who was friends with the gypsies felt the more touched by chicaneries Papusza had to endure from her brethren. Ficowski often said he was greatly fortunate to meet Papusza and to be know as her discoverer. Papusza, however was unlucky enough to meet him.

She left the caravan. Only her old, sick husband didn't abandon her. Tuwim and Ficowski remained close to her. The Romani lived only in her memories. She wrote in a letter to Ficowski in 1952.

Excluded from the gypsy community , she lived for 30 years outside of it. She stopped writing. A few of her last poems were published in 1970. A lot of what she had written, she burned along with letters from friends, Tuwim among others. "If I only had not leaned to read and write, stupid me, maybe I'd have been happier", she confessed at the end of her life.

Papusza's Life After Life

In 1974 Maja and Ryszard Wójcik made a documentary, Papusza, based on their own script, having asked Ficowski to be their consultant.

In 1991 another documentary was made, The Story of a Gypsy, scripted and directed by Greg Kowalski with music by Jan Kanty Pawluśkiewicz It shows among others the memoirs of Papusza herself, of Jerzy Ficowski, of her sister Janina Zielińska, of her son Władysław Wajs and her doctor Maria Serafiniuk.

On the 24th of June1994 in the Kraków Theatre in the Błonie park, Jan Kanty Pawluśkiewicz conducted the premiere of his symphonic poem Papusza's Harp, performed in the Romani language, with a cast of opera stars, including the Met star Gwendolyn Bradley. The piece was meant to be the Gypsy Mass but it finally grew to a form this rich. The spectacle was directed by Krzysztof Jasiński, a specialist in great outdoor performances

In 2013 the feature film Papusza will be in cinemas, directed and scripted by Joanna Kos Krauze and Krzysztof Krauze, with a soundtrack from the Papusza's Harp score by Pawluśkiewicz.

Autor: Janusz R. Kowalczyk, June 2013

http://culture.pl/en/artist/papusza