Zuzanna Ginczanka Plaque
Kraków Artists: Writers and Poets
A commemorative plaque on the house on Mikołajska Street, set into the wall in March 2017, on the centenary of the poet's birth, at the place where Zuzanna Ginczanka (born Sara Polina Gincburg in 1917 in Kyiv), a Polish poet of Jewish origin, hid from imprisonment and death. After April 1944 she died in Kraków. Please be respectful and considerate of the building's residents.
History
Zuzanna Ginczanka, born Sara Polina Gincburg, came into the world in 1917 in Kyiv, into an assimilated Jewish family. After the revolution her parents left for Równe in Volhynia, and the girl was brought up by her grandmother. She wrote poems from the age of ten. Encouraged by Julian Tuwim, she entered a competition run by "Wiadomości Literackie" in 1934 and received a distinction; from spring 1935 she contributed to the magazine. She studied in Warsaw, wrote satirical verse for "Szpilki", and in 1936 published her only collection, "O centaurach" (On Centaurs).
After the outbreak of war she found herself in Lviv, where she married Michał Weinzieher and hid from the Germans until 1943. She then fled, spent several months in Felsztyn and finally reached Kraków, where her husband found her a hiding place. The circumstances in which she was discovered are told in different versions. She was arrested by the Gestapo; she was held in the Montelupich prison, then on Czarnieckiego Street, and was most probably shot in the Płaszów camp in 1944.
In March 2017, on the hundredth anniversary of her birth, a memorial plaque was set into the wall of the house on Mikołajska Street where the poet had been hiding.
Did you know?
In 1942 Ginczanka wrote the poem "Non omnis moriar", in which she recorded the name of the caretaker of the building where she was hiding. After the war the manuscript of the poem served as evidence in the case against the woman, who was convicted of informing.