A Greek Statue

The poet Wisława Szymborska was a 16-year-old in Krakow, Poland, when Germany invaded her country in 1939. Everything changed after that: The Nazis banned secondary schools and universities, so she had to finish high school illegally. Eventually, after the war, she went to university—and ultimately won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. She kept writing about the long trail of violence through the centuries, and the stories we tell about that violence in hindsight. “History counts its skeletons in round numbers,” she wrote in the poem “.” “A thousand and one remains a thousand, / as though the one had never existed: an imaginary embryo, an empty cradle.”