perspectives
An English professor discovers the details of the life of a Jewish concentration camp survivor.
By Holli Levitsky
It was April 2002, and I had just presented a paper about Sara
Nomberg-Przytyk and two other writers to the Polish Association for
English Studies in Kazimierz Dolny, in eastern Poland. Sara was a
Polish-Jewish writer who penned a memoir about her years in a Nazi
concentration camp. But little was known about the rest of her life.
Then, a Polish colleague approached me.
"Excuse me," she said, with only slightly accented English. "I grew
up with the Przytyk boys in Lublin. Would they be related to the
subject of your talk, Sara Nomberg-Przytyk?"
Indeed, my subject had children. She died in 1990, but her brief
biography referred to her forced emigration from Poland during the
anti-Semitic campaign against the Jews in 1968 and the husband and sons
who accompanied her.
Could this be the same family?
My Polish colleague gave me the e-mail address of Jurek Przytyk, a
farmer in Quebec. After returning to the United States, I contacted
him. He was the elder son of Sara Nomberg-Przytyk. Sara had spent the
last 10 years of her life on his farm. Jurek invited me to visit him
and meet Sara's remaining family members and many friends.
They say every journey brings blessings, and my July 2003 visit to
Jurek's Shazam Farms brought many. People came from Denmark, Vancouver,
Boston and Quebec to tell their stories. Sara, I learned, was a
remarkable woman and writer. Born into a Hasidic family in 1915 Poland,
she turned to communism in her youth, was imprisoned first for her
prewar communist work, and then incarcerated at Auschwitz as a Jew.
She returned to Poland after the war to help build the new communist
government, working as a journalist and editor, until she and most of
the remaining Polish Jews were forced out of the country in 1967 and
1968.
I knew her only from her memoir titled "Auschwitz: True Tales From a
Grotesque Land," published in 1987. Smuggled out of Poland in 1967
because it was "too Jewish," the work was discovered in the Yad Vashem
archives in Israel. Now, I learned that she had published two earlier
memoirs in Polish and wrote another before she died.
The stories I heard during my visit left a deep impression. When I
began teaching at LMU in 1989, I was already interested in women's
literature. But I was encouraged by Mel Bertolozzi, then chair of the
Department of English, to delve into Jewish literature. Now I had come
across a life that reflected the world of Polish Jews before and after
World War II. I needed to write about this eloquent woman whose clear,
humanistic ideals influenced people on several continents, a woman
almost passed over by history. Born a Jew, she lived as a Communist,
then returned to Judaism when that ideal failed her.
In December 2007, I returned to Warsaw to speak about the personal
and political life of Sara Nomberg-Przytyk at a conference about the
1967-68 anti-Semitic campaign. In the audience sat Jurek Przytyk, who
offered hope for the future when he stood after my talk and announced
his verdict: "Polish communism failed my mother, but Hebrew humanism
saved her."