- Zuzanna Ginczanka
Zuzanna Ginczanka (1917–44) was a Jewish-Polish poet.
Life
Zuzanna Ginczanka was born Zuzanna Polina Gincburg in
Kiev , then part of theRussian Empire . Her Jewish parents fled the Russian Revolution, settling in the Yiddish-speaking, then-Polish town ofRówne , now inUkraine .Ginczanka spoke both Russian, the choice of her emancipated parents, and the Polish of her friends. Her longing to become a Polish poet caused her to choose the Polish language. She published her first poems while still at school.
During the years 1939-1941 she lived in Soviet
Lviv , working as an editor. She wrote a number of Soviet propaganda poems. She moved toKraków in 1941, her perfect Polish allowing her to survive as a non-Jew under a false identity. However, friends connections to the resistance twice led to her denunciation and arrest. She was denounced by house owner, which ended in her execution in 1944.Despite the quality of her poetry, she was ignored and forgotten in postwar Poland, as communist censors deemed her work to be undesirable.
In 1991 a volume of her collected poems was published, and in 1994 a biography by Izolda Kiec.
Publications
* "O centaurach" (1936)
* "Wiersze wybrane" (1953)
* "Udźwignąć własne szczęście" (1991)ee also
*
Polish culture during World War II Further reading
* Izolda Kiec "Zuzanna Ginczanka. Życie i twórczość." (1994)
* Agata Araszkiewicz "Wypowiadam wam moje życie. Melancholia Zuzanny Ginczanki." (2001)
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