Tadeusz Różewicz, who has died at the age of 92, was one of the great European "witness" poets whose own lives were directly affected by the seismic events of the 20th century. "My decimated generation is now departed and dying, duped and disillusioned," he said soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He saw the forgetting of history as a disaster, "the falling of tears on the stock exchange" as he wrote in a poem of 1994.

That generation, born just after the first world war, amid the great chaotic redrawing of maps, saw the rise of fascism, the terrors of the second world war (both Różewicz and his brother Janusz – also a poet – served in the Polish Underground, Janusz being killed by the Gestapo in 1944), then watched the Iron Curtain descend across Europe and survived, if they did, Stalinism without being jailed or killed to see the clock tick towards 1989 and what they sometimes considered the false reinterpretation of their own pasts.

Różewicz's own recounting of his life, Mother Departs – a work part memoir, part diary, part recorded conversation, part poetry – presents us with the picture of a childhood that begins with an intensely religious mother who was born Jewish but then became part of the Catholic community. By the time Tadeusz was born the family was living in a small town, but she had spent years in a small backward village and her vivid descriptions of village life, which he recalls in Mother Departs, made a strong impression on the poet in his understanding of human potential.

Różewicz's first poems were religious and he never quite lost sight of the idea of good and evil. He did after all see plenty of the latter. After studying the history of art at university in Krakow he began to publish both poetry and plays and made his reputation in both, developing a collage style in plays like The Card Index.

As a poet he took his stand with those who discarded what most people thought of as "the poetic". He chose simple language and a broad modernist technique to pursue images to the darkest of conclusions.

this is a table I said

this is a table

on the table there is bread a knife

the knife is for cutting the bread

bread feeds people

…

what is a knife for

it's for cutting off the heads of enemies

it's for cutting off the heads of

women children old people…

The texture of the voice was not unlike those we might find in other European poets of his generation, Herbert, Milosz, and Leopold Staff before them, but also Holan, Holub, Popa and Enzensberger who defined the marvellous Penguin Modern European Poets series of the 1970s where his own selection appeared in 1975 and where I first read him within the terms of a morally superior cold war poetry but as someone too inventive and humane to be anybody's textbook example of anything. Poetry for his generation was a recourse against rhetoric, a way of speaking truth between the lines of politics and violence. In other ways Różewicz may remind us of Objectivists such as Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Oppen and Carl Rakosi. We can map him broadly if not fully.

Różewicz's eye was merciless but the poems are full of human sympathy. "Childhood is like that blurred face on a gold coin that rings clear," he wrote in one poem. In another, Pigtail, he considers the shaved hair of the women in a wartime camp:

The hair is not shot through with light

is not parted by the breeze

is not touched by any hand

or rain or lips

This is both tender and remorseless. It is as much an act of disciplined witness as what follows:

In huge chests

clouds of dry hair of those suffocated

and a faded plait

a pigtail with a ribbon

pulled at school

by naughty boys.

Różewicz was a major figure in modernist poetry but his modernism has little to do with theory and formal experiment as such. There is, in his harsh clarity, something beyond, a touch of early Chagall perhaps, as though life were sacred after all. He has been done proud by his chief translator Adam Czerniawski and will be one of the poets through whom we continue to understand what happened in the last century.