Building the Barricade, harrowing and demanding, here takes its place in English among the twentieth century's master works of war-witness.”—Jane Hirshfield

Building the Barricade, is poetry of witness, and 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. Building the Barricade is Anna Swirszczynska’s 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.

Swirszczynska had joined the resistance as a military nurse and later wrote: “Day and night German bombers raged over the capital, burying the living beneath the rubble.”