PAUL POLANSKY

One of the pitfalls of editing a literary journal is that out of the poets and writers you meet, 99 percent of them spend 99 percent of their time whining about their love lives. Eventually, the sensitivities are blunted until you reach the point where you pull the covers over your head at the slightest hint of another human being's pain. Then you encounter a writer like Paul Polansky. And God help you if you ignore him.

Mr. Polansky's stock-in-trade is genocide-specifically, the fight against the systematic efforts to exterminate the Roma (also known as Gypsies) in Eastern Europe. In his poetry collections Living Through It Twice, The River Killed My Brother, and Not a Refugee, Mr. Polansky carefully delineates the atrocities of Czechs, Slovaks, Albanians, and others (even NATO and the UN are not innocent here) against the Roma. "Art" is tossed to the winds -- don't look for the little niceties such as form, meter, or rhyme in these poems. What remains is the raw power of the darker side of the human psyche -- fear, hatred, grief, loss, violence, torture, and an ever-dimming hope of compassion and rescue. But perhaps that was the point of "Art" in the first place.

Mr. Polansky is a native of Mason City, Iowa. In his undergraduate days, Mr. Polansky opted to spend his junior year at Madrid University, which became the beginning of a lifetime odyssey through Europe, an odyssey which led him to become one of the most sought-after writer-lecturers concerning Eastern European human rights issues for our time. His other books include The Storm, a novel; Stray Dog (Poems of a Fighting Freak), a paeon to, or rather against, the violence in boxing; and Black Silence and The Gypsies of Kosovo (non-fiction).

Paul Polansky's writings have a way of waking you up at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat. They can also reawaken the most dormant social conscience. So don't say I didn't warn you.

Robert Dunn, Executive Editor Medicinal Purposes Literary Review New York

In December 2004, the City Council of Weimar, in northeast Germany, unanimously awarded it's prestigious Human Rights Award to Paul Polansky, an American historian and author. Polansky was nominated for the award by Guenther Grass, recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature. The following excerpt is from Polansky's acceptance speech:

 Louise Arbour, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has told the press on several occasions that all those responsible for violations of human rights should be brought to justice.

 UN secretary-general Kofi Annan has also stated publicly on numerous occasions that the UN must assume a greater role to insist on the responsibility of States to protect, not injure, their own citizens so it is going to be interesting to see if the UN will apply the same standards to their own personnel that they demand from other countries when it comes to their human rights violations in Kosovo.

 Of course, not many people want to hear about the UN violating human rights after all, when you have Hollywood stars acting as your ambassadors, as UNHCR does, why would any newspaper editor want to run a story about celebrities covering up crimes against humanity? But it does beg the question: why does UNHCR need Hollywood stars to promote their image? Shouldn't UNHCR's good works be their best public relations device?