During the German occupation of Poland in World War II, Ficowski who lived in Włochy 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.

After the war, Ficowski returned to Warsaw and enrolled at the university in order to study philosophy and sociology.

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 from the ashes of the old.

Under the communist regime he had urged his fellow writers to voice their concerns over censorship and the suppression of workers.