You may have noticed the term “unprecedented times” has become a very common way to describe life over the last few years. In some ways, that’s true, but just because these exact circumstances may feel new 0r shocking, often there is precedence.

History has a lot to teach us. Trupa Trupa is a rock band from Gdańsk, Poland, and their music is greatly informed by their home’s history — the Holocaust, World War II and Poland’s communist regime.

Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is the singer and guitarist for Trupa Trupa. He’s also a published poet, a human rights activist, frequent university guest lecturer and currently an artist-in-residence at Yale. Today, he joins us to talk about that history, why it’s so important to keep the memories of that history alive and how remembering the past can help us now.

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Miguel Perez. Our senior producer is Kimberly Junod and our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.