During the German occupation of Poland in World War II, Ficowski who lived in W?ochy near Warsaw was a member of the Polish resistance. He was a member of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK), was imprisoned in the infamous Pawiak and took part in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. His codename was Wrak and he fought in Mokotów region. Following the uprising, Ficowski entered a camp with other survivors of the battle.

After the war, Ficowski returned to Warsaw and enrolled at the university in order to study philosophy and sociology. There he published his first volume of poetry, O?owiani ?o?nierze (The Tin Soldiers, 1948). This volume reflected the Stalinist atmosphere of the early postwar Poland, in which heroes of the Armia Krajowa Warsaw Uprising were treated with suspicion at best, arrested and executed at worst, together with the sense of a new city arising on the ashes of the old.

His early works show the influence of Julian Tuwim. Later he became interested in the poems of the interwar period, with elements of fantasy and grotesque. In the later period his poems reflected various moral and social aspects of life in the People's Republic of Poland.

From 1948 to 1950 Ficowski chose to travel with Polish Gypsies and came to write several volumes on or inspired by the Roma way of life, including Amulety i defilacje (Amulets and Definitions, 1960) and Cyganie na polskich drogach (Gypsies on the Polish Roads, 1965). He was the member of the Gypsy Lore Society and translated the poems of Bronis?awa Wajs (Papusza). He was interested in many aspects of international poetry. He translated the poems of the Spanish poet, Federico García Lorca, and he was also a known specialist of Jewish folklore and Jewish poetry, becoming an editor of the Jewish poem anthology Rodzynki z migda?ami (Raisins with Almonds, 1964).

Ficowski devoted many years of his life to the study of the life and works of Bruno Schulz, and in 1967 published the first edition of what is considered the definitive biography of him, entitled Regions of the Great Heresy. He received the award of the Polish Pen Club in 1977. His 1979 collection of poems, A Reading of Ashes, has been called the most moving account of the Holocaust written by a non-Jew.[1]

After he signed the letter of 59 in 1975, in the late 1970s, all of Ficowski's works had been banned in Poland. However, his prose and poems were translated widely in the West and the emergence of Solidarity in the 1980s brought his works back to Poland's bookshelves. He was active in the opposition movement, and was a member of the Workers' Defence Committee (Komitet Obrony Robotników, KOR) and later the Committee for Social Self-defence KOR.

Under the communist regime he had urged his fellow writers to voice their concerns over censorship and the suppression of workers. His most public statement was a letter to the Writers Union in which he said, "I do not believe deeply in the immediate effectiveness of letters to the government, but even less do I believe in the effectiveness of silence."

Following the fall of communism, liberalisation of Poland and its breaking with the Soviet bloc, Ficowski continued to write and translate works from languages as diverse as Spanish and Romanian, not to mention the Yiddish and Roma languages that had always fascinated him.

Poetry

• O?owiani ?o?nierze (1948)
• Zwierzenia (1952)
• Po polsku (1955)
• Moje strony ?wiata (1957)
• Makowskie bajki (1959)
• Amulety i defilacje ("Amulets and Definitions") (1960), inspired by his stay with Gypsies
• Pismo obrazkowe (1962)
• Ptak poza ptakiem (1968)
• Odczytanie popio?ów (1979); on the Jews and their suffering; illustrated by Marc Chagall; translated by Keith Bosley as A Reading of Ashes, 1981)
• Errata (1981)
• ?mier? jednoro?ca (1981)
• Przepowiednie. Pojutrznia (1983)
• Inicja? (1994)
• Mistrz Manole i inne przek?ady (2004; collected translations of poetry)
• Zawczas z poniewczasem (2004)
• Pantareja (2006)

Poetic prose

• Wspominki starowarszawskie (1959)
• Czekanie na sen psa (1970; translated by Soren A. Gauger and Marcin Piekoszewski as Waiting for the Dog to Sleep, 2006)

Others

• Cyganie polscy (1953)
• Cyganie na polskich drogach (1965)
• Ga??zka z drzewa s?o?ca (1961)
• Rodzynki z migda?ami (1964)
• Regiony wielkiej herezji (1967, revised editions 1975, 1992, 2002; translated by Theodosia S. Robertson as Regions of the Great Heresy, 2000)
• Okolice sklepów cynamonowych (1986)
• Demony cudzego strachu (1986)
• Cyganie w Polsce. Dzieje i obyczaje (1989; translated by Eileen Healey as The Gypsies in Poland. History and Customs, 1989)