Strong memory / Color ways
Today, please join us in a blazing welcome for our latest Hydra: poet, activist, and member of the psychedelic post-punk band Trupa Trupa, Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, joined by Amy Chu, artist and publisher of Camoot.Journal.
Issue No. 542
Cats and Mice
Grzegorz Kwiatkowski
VOGUS Spring 2026 Trend Predictions
Amy Chu
Cats and Mice
by Grzegorz Kwiatkowski
When I was a child in Gdańsk’s Old Town, I used to see groups of elderly German tourists walking through the streets. I would run into one of their little clusters, shout “Hitler kaput!”, and then run away as fast as I could. I remember the feeling very clearly. I was proud of myself. I felt morally superior.
Years later, that certainty became harder to maintain. One of my grandfathers had been imprisoned in the Stutthof concentration camp and was later forcibly conscripted into the Wehrmacht. My other grandfather was German and, after the war, changed his surname to a Polonised version.
In this part of Europe, moral questions do not stay abstract for long. They move quickly into private biographies, and private biographies are unstable things. They contain silence, contradiction, fear, shame, missing facts and facts discovered too late. Public language prefers clean categories. Family history usually refuses them.
As an adult, I spent years pressing the authorities of Gdańsk to mark the former site of the Jewish ghetto on Granary Island. Eventually the city installed a plaque there. I am glad it exists. But I later realised that many coach tours of elderly Germans stop in the nearby car park, and that one of the first things those visitors will see is that plaque. For a moment, I felt satisfaction. Something vindictive. Something like a small private reward. Then, almost immediately, I felt ashamed.
Keep us breathing fire!
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