Krystyna Żywulska

Krystyna Żywulska , pseudonym of (Sonia) Landau , (born September 1, 1914 in Łódź , Russian Empire ; died August 1, 1993 in Düsseldorf ) was a Polish writer , resistance fighter and survivor of Auschwitz .

Life

Sonia Landau grew up in Łódź and began studying law in Warsaw. After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, because she was of Jewish descent, she first fled east to Lemberg and then lived again with her family in Warsaw in the Warsaw Ghetto established by the German occupiers . In 1942 she escaped from the ghetto and lived in illegality. She joined the Polish resistance and worked in a group that produced forged documents. In 1943 she was arrested by the Germans and spent three months in Pawiak prison . During the Gestapo interrogation, she changed her name to Krystyna Żywulska . She was sentenced to death, but then deported as a political prisoner to the Auschwitz concentration camp . From there she was assigned to a women's detachment that was supposed to register the newcomers to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp . The later Israeli child psychologist Batsheva Dagan also worked with her in the area called “ Canada ” in the immediate vicinity of the gas chambers .

In Auschwitz, Krystyna Żywulska wrote poems like Morning Roll Call , The Letter Never Sent , The Ausmarsch and Before there were birch trees , which were secretly passed on among the prisoners and learned by heart. Most of these poems have been lost, only eight of them can still be identified, four she incorporated into her book Przeżyłam Oświęcim .

In 1945 Żywulska managed to escape on a death march (Auschwitz- Loslau ). In 1946 she published her camp memories under the title I survived Auschwitz . She married her childhood friend Leon Andrzejewski (1910–1978), who had managed to escape to the Soviet Union at the beginning of the war. Her husband made a career in the security apparatus of communist Poland and they had two children. She now wrote satires, feature pages, wrote mock poems, epigrams and limericks . Her cabaret monologues, skits and lyrics were performed in Poland and recited on the radio and film. Szpilki magazine printed her lyrics, and the singer Sława Przybylska made her song Żyje się raz popular in 1968 .

At the end of the 1950s she met Thomas Harlan , son of director Veit Harlan , who had made propaganda films during the Nazi era in Warsaw . Harlan worked there in archives on Nazi crimes and the Nazi perpetrators who had returned to work and honored in the Federal Republic of Germany. She helped him with the research, the publication of which was not desired in the Federal Republic, but which helped to get the German Nazi trials in motion in the sixties. Harlan wanted to develop the material into a great literary work, which he ultimately failed. The two became lovers, which scandalized her husband and Warsaw society until Harlan was expelled from Poland in 1964. Żywulska met Harlan in Milan and Paris until the relationship ended. Thirty years later Andrzej Szczypiorski commented: "A more foolish love than that which an aging Jew has for a crazy young German is hard to imagine".

Żywulska wrote her second book, Empty Water , in 1963, about the experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto; the book was translated into French in 1972 by Szymon Laks, the musician of the prisoners' orchestra in Auschwitz . Her satires did not find any resonance in Poland at the end of the sixties, when another anti - Semitic agitation started there and the Jew Żywulska was ostracized. Żywulska emigrated with her sons in 1968 to the "land of perpetrators" and came from Munich to Düsseldorf , where they found an apartment and new friends. She translated her two autobiographical books and the poems themselves into German and presented them on reading tours. In old age she discovered painting for herself. The Cologne painter David Ostrowski is her grandson.

reception

Maria Nurowska's novel Letters of Love (Listy miłości) in 1991 took on Żywulska's autobiographical topics from her time in the concentration camp, which she had discussed with Nurowska. In 1998 Liane Dirks processed diary entries and conversations with Zywulska in her work Krystyna. And love? I ask her , which is half document and half literary stylization, in order to get closer to what , according to Szczypiorski, she only half-uttered truths. In 2012 Jake Heggie composed the short opera Another Sunrise , in which the protagonist (Żywulska) tries at night to find a language for her memories in order to preserve them in a tape recording.

Works (selection)

• Przeżyłam Oświęcim . Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza "Wiedza", Warsaw 1946.
  • Where there were birches before. Survival report of a young woman from Auschwitz-Birkenau . Kindler, Munich 1979, ISBN 3-463-00763-0 .
  • Dance girl From the Warsaw Ghetto to Auschwitz. A survival report . Foreword Vercors . Revised version. dtv, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-423-10983-1 .
• Empty water: a novel based on authentic experiences . Darmstädter Blätter, Darmstadt 1980, ISBN 3-87139-061-5 .
• The real truth: satires . Eremiten-Presse, Düsseldorf 1983, ISBN 3-87365-196-3 .
• In honor of the family, and other satires . Herbig, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-7766-1513-3 .

literature

• Maria Nurowska: Letters of Love . From the polish. by Albrecht Lempp. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-596-50529-1 .
• Liane Dirks: And love? I ask her. The unwritten story of Krystyna Zywulska. Novel . Ammann, Zurich 1998, ISBN 3-250-10338-1 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Krystyna Żywulska in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Krystyna Żywulska in the bibliographic database WorldCat
• Krystyna Zywulska in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Barbara Milewski: Krystyna Żywulska , at holocaustmusic (en) World ORT

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Marta Kijowska : The full truth about Sonja L. , in: FAZ , August 30, 2014, p. 18, online here , viewed December 7, 2014.
2. ↑ Batsheva Dagan: My Life ( Memento of the original from September 3, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , see also entry Dagan, Bat Shevaʿ at DNB 
3. ^ Krystyna Żywulska: Where there were birches before , Darmstadt 1980, p. 64 f; P. 86 ff; P. 160 ff .; P. 228 f
4. ↑ Maria Zaręmbińska: Foreword to an edition of a poem under the title: Oświęcim , Warsaw 1951, translated into German and printed as a follow-up, in: Krystyna Żywulska: Where before Birken were , Darmstadt 1980, pp. 289-291
5. ^ ^{A b} Andrzej Szczypiorski: Love and Memory . In: Der Spiegel . No. 3 , 1999 ( online ).
6. ↑ Another Sunrise ( Memento of the original from May 17, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , at music of remembrance