Cecylia Słapakowa
Cecylia Słapakowa , engl. Cecila Slepak (born around 1900; died 1942 or 1943 ) was a Polish-Jewish translator and journalist who worked for the Oneg Shabbat underground archive in the Warsaw ghetto .
Life
Cecylia Słapakowa came from a family of educated, Russian-speaking Jews living in the Vilna area. She lived in Warsaw and belonged to the intellectual elite associated with secular Judaism and Polish culture. Her main work is the translation of the twelve-volume History of the Jews by the Russian historian Simon Dubnow into Polish ( Historia Żydów ), which was published in 1939 and posthumously in 1948. As a journalist, she wrote a. a. for the Jewish-Polish daily newspaper Nasz Przegląd . She was married to an engineer; whether she had children is uncertain. Samuel D. Kassow attributes her to a daughter. Cecylia Słapakowa maintained close relationships with Jewish writers and artists. During the German occupation of Poland up to the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940, she still invited guests to her apartment, although the Germans had confiscated a lot of furniture and valuables. She continued her pre-war literary salon and tried to lead a normal life for as long as possible.
In the spring of 1940 she had to leave her apartment. Little is known about her life in the ghetto, writes the Israeli historian Dalia Ofer . Cecylia Słapakowa worked for the Oneg Shabbat underground archive. Its founder, Emanuel Ringelblum , commissioned her in 1941 with a study of the life of Jewish women in the Warsaw ghetto. From December 1941 to spring 1942 she conducted interviews with sixteen women of different social backgrounds. She asked them about their life before the war, the first effects of the German occupation on their everyday life and their efforts to develop strategies in the ghetto to cope with the increasing impoverishment of their families, hunger, disease and growing dangers. She was able to complete sixteen short biographies. They are stored in Polish with their initials in the Marigold Archive in Yad Vashem .
Like many other employees of the archive was Cecylia Słapakowa according to information of Emmanuel Ringelblum in the summer of 1942 in a mass transport to the Treblinka extermination camp deported and murdered. According to another source, she is said to have been taken to the Trawniki forced labor camp and died in 1943.
According to the journalist Rachel Auerbach (1903-1976), her husband survived the Holocaust . One of the women interviewed is known to have survived: Basia Temkin-Berman, who worked in the Warsaw City Library before the war .
swell
- Dalia Ofer: Cecila Slepak , Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. March 1, 2009. Jewish Women's Archive (accessed February 17, 2016).
- The Roles of Women: Cecelia Slepak's Study , in: Rinat Maagan-Ginovker: The Continuation and Renewed Role of the Jewish Wife and Mother . The International School for Holocaust Studies. Yad Vashem, (accessed February 17, 2016).
literature
- Dalia Ofer: Her View Through My Lens. Cecilia Slepak Studies Women in the Warsaw Ghetto . In: Judith Tydor Baumel, Tova Cohen (eds.): Gender, Place and Memory in the Modern Jewish Experience , Vallentine Mitchell, London 2003, ISBN 978-0-85303-489-6 , pp. 29-50.
- Samuel D. Kassow: Ringelblum's Legacy. The secret archive of the Warsaw Ghetto , Rowohlt, Reinbek, 2010, ISBN 978-3-498-03547-1 .
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Słapakowa, Cecylia |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Slepak, Cecila |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Polish translator and journalist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | around 1900 |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1942 or 1943 |