Zuzanna Ginczanka

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Zuzanna Ginczanka (1938)
Zuzanna Ginczanka: O centaurach (1936)

Zuzanna Ginczanka , originally Zuzanna Polina Gincburg or Zuzanna Pola Gincburżanka , (born March 22, 1917 in Kiev , Russian Empire ; died December 1944 in Krakow ) was a Polish poet and victim of the Holocaust . Her last poem is considered a masterpiece of Polish poetry for the Shoah .

life and work

Zuzanna Ginczanka was born as Zuzanna Polina Gincburg in Kiev as the daughter of Russian Jews . Her parents emigrated to Poland shortly after the outbreak of the October Revolution . The family settled in Równe in Volhynia , and Zuzanna's grandparents soon followed suit. Her father, an actor, went to Berlin, later to the United States, and her mother remarried in Spain. Zuzanna grew up with her grandmother Klara Sandberg, who ran a pharmacy. However, she was never granted Polish citizenship.

She attended a Polish high school and began writing poetry at the age of ten. At the suggestion of Julian Tuwim , she took part in a nationwide poetry competition in 1934 and won an award for her poem Gramatyka . From the spring of 1935 she wrote for the leading Polish literary magazine Wiadomości Literackie and was the only woman in the circle around the scamanders .

After graduating from high school , she moved to Warsaw to study pedagogy and changed her name to Zuzanna Ginczanka. She published satirical and anti-fascist poems. Her early poetry is also characterized by sensuality and plays with androgynous motifs. Zuzanna Ginczanka frequented Warsaw literary circles, where she met Witold Gombrowicz, among others . In 1936, at the age of nineteen, she published her only volume of poetry published during her lifetime with the title O centaurach .

Memorial plaque in Krakow

After the outbreak of World War II , she fled to Lviv, which was then occupied by the Soviet Union, and in early 1940 she married the Polish art historian Michał Weinzieher (1903–1944). When the German Wehrmacht marched into Lemberg in June 1941 , they had to go into hiding and flee again during a police operation in the summer of 1942. Her last poem is probably from this time. It has no title and begins with the Latin phrase Non omnis moriar . In it she recalls the names of her landlady, "Frau Chomin from Lemberg, brave spy wife", and her son, a Nazi collaborator , by whom she was denounced to the German occupiers , and mocks them. She wrote the poem on a piece of paper that she carried with her for two years. It is considered a masterpiece of Polish poetry for the Shoah . Zuzanna Ginczanka's life strategy consisted of overcoming her “fateful otherness” through the language and culture she had chosen, writes Elżbieta Adamiak . Her last poem expresses her forced identity as a Jew in the face of the Holocaust. With the poem Ginczanka expressed not only her personal experience of constant fear of death, but the fate she shared with other Jews.

Stumbling block for Zuzanna Ginczanka in Rivne, pl. Teatralna, 1

With the help of her friends Maria Güntner and Janusz Woźniakowski, Ginczanka hid with her husband in Krakow from 1943, where she could not leave the house for a year. After being denounced again by neighbors, she was arrested by the Gestapo in the autumn of 1944 in the house at 5 Mikołajska Street and tortured in prison. The reason for her arrest is said to have been her contact with the Polish underground movement, not her Jewish origin, which her school friend Blumka Fradis first betrayed under torture. In December 1944, both women were shot in the courtyard of Kraków's Montelupich prison, a few weeks before Kraków was liberated by the Red Army in January 1945.

Her husband was also murdered in 1944. Her grandmother Klara Sandberg died while being transported to a concentration camp .

Her poems were published posthumously in several anthologies in Poland . They reflect how their life became increasingly a struggle for survival. Apart from the poem Non omnis moriar , hardly anything has survived from her work, which was written during the war . For a long time, Zuzanna Ginczanka was little known outside of Polish Jewish studies . Thanks to the research work of the literary scholar Izolda Kiec , who published the first monograph on Zuzanna Ginczanka in 1993, her work and life in Poland was made accessible. Another monograph followed by Agata Araszkiewicz in 2002.

In memory of Zuzanna Ginczanka, the artist Gunter Demnig laid a stumbling block on July 26, 2018 on Theater Square in what is now the Ukrainian city of Rivne .

Publications

  • 1936: O centaurach . Warsaw: Wydawnictwo J. Przeworskiego Wikisource
  • 1953: Wiersze wybrane (Selected poems)
  • 1989 and 2014: Zuzanna Ginczanka. Wiersze zebrane (collection of poems edited by Izolda Kiec, supplemented in 2014 with poems about Zuzanna Ginczanka)
  • 1991 Udźwignąć własne szczęście: poezje . Edited by Izolda Kiec. Poznań: Książnica Włóczęgów i Uczonych
  • 2012: Krzątanina mglistych pozorów / Un viavai di brumose apparenze (Polish and Italian)
  • 2014: Wniebowstąpienie ziemi ( collection of poems edited by Tadeusz Dąbrowski )

literature

  • Izolda Kiec: Zuzanna Ginczanka. Życie i twórczość . Obserwator, Poznań 1994, ISBN 83-901720-0-3 . (Also dissertation University Poznań 1993 Polish )
    • Excerpts in German translation by Henryk Bereska in: Dichterinnen aus dem Dunkel. Volume 2. WIR eV Polsko-Niemieckie Towarzystwo Literackie, 1995, OCLC 750664729 .
  • Agata Araszkiewicz: Wypowiadam wam moje życie. Melancholia Zuzanny Ginczanki. Fundacja OŚKA, Warsaw 2001, ISBN 83-909820-8-0 .
  • Elżbieta Adamiak : About screws, pillars and bridges… poets and theologians from Central and Eastern European contexts brought up. In: Yearbook of the European Society for Theological Research of Women (= Journal of the European Society of Women in Theological Research, ESWTR). 2006, pp. 9–24, here pp. 18–22.
  • Bożena Shallcross: The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture . Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2011, ISBN 978-0-253-35564-5 .

documentary

  • Mary Mirki Milo (Director): La Poesia Spezzata - Zuzanna Ginczanka 1917–1944 . Premiere 2014 at the literary festival Port Literacki Wrocław . Movie trailer (Italian)

Web links

Commons : Zuzanna Ginczanka  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

References and comments

  1. ↑ In 1930 she was enrolled in the Tadeusz Kościuszko School in Równe under the name of Zuzanna Pola Gincburżanka.
  2. ↑ Наталія Бельченко: "Київська чарівнице, Суламіто ..." , at: Culture.pl, February 28, 2018 (Ukrainian).
  3. ↑ Mikołaj Gliński: Zuzanna Ginczanka's Beauty and Brand , at Culture.pl , Adam Mickiewicz Institute (English).
  4. ↑ Elżbieta Adamiak: Of screws, pillars and bridges. P. 21, fn. 19.
  5. ↑ Bozena Shallcross: The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture . P. 38. Elżbieta Adamiak: About screws, pillars and bridges. P. 16.
  6. ↑ According to Horace . Literal translation: "I will not die completely." In the literary translation into German, Henryk Bereska (1995) gives the poem the title Legacy .
  7. ↑ Quoted by Elżbieta Adamiak: About screws, pillars and bridges. P. 19.
  8. ↑ Bozena Shallcross: The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture . P. 39.
  9. ↑ Elżbieta Adamiak: Of screws, pillars and bridges. Pp. 20-21.
  10. ↑ Bozena Shallcross: The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture . P. 39, p. 145 fn.
  11. ↑ a b The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture , ibid., P. 38 f.
  12. ↑ Bożena Shallcross: The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture , Indiana University Press 2011, ISBN 978-0-253-35564-5 , p. 147.
  13. ↑ Izolda Kiec is a professor at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw
  14. ↑ istpravda.com.ua: Five memorial stones in the streets of Rivne for Nazi victims, July 31, 2018 (in Ukrainian), accessed on October 15, 2018.
  15. ↑ Review by h-net
personal data
SURNAME Ginczanka, Zuzanna
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gincburg, Zuzanna Polina; Gincburżanka, Zuzanna Pola
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish poet and victim of the Holocaust
DATE OF BIRTH March 22, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Kiev , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH December 1944
Place of death Krakow