Henryka Łazowertówna

Life

Henryka Łazowertówna was the daughter of Maksymilian Łazowert and his wife Bluma. Her mother was a schoolteacher. Łazowertówna studied Polish and Romance philology at the University of Warsaw, and subsequently French literature at the University of Grenoble on a scholarship funded by the Polish interwar Government.

She was a very active member of the Warsaw section of the Polish Writers' Union, participating in the events organized by the institution, such as for example the conference commemorating the 10th anniversary of the death of the writer Stefan Żeromski in December 1935, an event during which she read from her works alongside such famous poets as Czesław Miłosz, Juljan Tuwim, and Kazimierz Wierzyński. Among the literary magazines of the day Łazowertówna collaborated principally with the literary journals Droga and Pion. She was seen as being poetically close to the Skamander circle, publishing in her short life of 33 years two collections of poetry, Zamknięty pokój ("A Closed Room"), in which the Closed Room of the title poem is self-avowedly a metaphor for the person of the poet herself, and Imiona świata ("The Names the World is Known By"), whose programmatic poem fulfills the poet's promise of the earlier collection to sound a voice uniquely her own among the women poets of the interbellum period. Zamknięty pokój ("A Closed Room") was – in the words of the writer and a stern literary critic Karol Wiktor Zawodziński (1890–1949) – a manifestation of a particularly subtile poetic talent and an extraordinary intelligence, both struggling to break free of the magic circle of subjectivism and onto the rough and tough ferment of the world (zamęt życia).

Politically speaking, Henryka Łazowertówna was known for her left-wing sympathies, a point on which she differed – in the opinion of Józef Łobodowski – from another famous poet of her generation, Zuzanna Ginczanka. However, her leftism was a condition of her sensitivity to social injustice and her moral rejection of all forms of oppression rather than an outcome of a political ideology. In contradistinction to Lucjan Szenwald, her contemporary, she remained fundamentally a lyric poet to the end.

Also unlike Ginczanka Łazowertówna was not a woman of extraordinary physical beauty, but she possessed charm and grace which, coupled with her simplicity of demeanour and straightforward attitude, made her in the eyes of those who knew her personally the embodiment of femininity. A certain simplicity and straightforwardness of style characterizes also her poetry. Łazowertówna never tried to project herself as other than she was. She lived in Warsaw with her mother in the ulica Sienna. She loved books, which she bought at a considerable harm to her meagre budget rather than using libraries because, as she explained, "when I tackle a book I do not part with it until I am finished, reading at meals, in bed... The book is with me at all times, I do not take a single step away from it, and such close companionship is possible only where a book does not repulse by its physical appearance [sc. as many library books do]. I do prefer to read a book untouched by the hands of others, to cut the pages, to rejoice in the peculiar fragrance of the printer's ink."

Identity

Biographer Eugenia Prokop-Janiec of Jagiellonian University asserts that it is the active antisemitism of the Polish society (Gazeta Warszawska) in the 1930s that ultimately forced the writers and poets like Henryka Łazowertówna who never espoused any particular aspect of specifically Jewish identity while working in the Polish language, to align themselves with the Jewish community for the first time during either the Interbellum or the Second World War. Indeed, the hostility obtaining between the Jewish and non-Jewish communities in Poland receives an eloquent treatment in Łazowertówna's own fictional short story Wrogowie ("The Enemies"), published in 1938 – sixteen months before the outbreak of the Second World War – where she tells the story of two child hawkers of pretzels, the one Jewish the other Gentile, who with great animosity towards each other aggressively compete for custom until common misfortune counsels them to join forces in the cause of common good (see Works in Prose).

Other established Jewish writers enjoyed the utmost prestige in the country, such as Bolesław Leśmian, Julian Tuwim, Antoni Słonimski as well as other Jewish members and celebrated recipients of the Golden Laurel from the Polish Academy of Literature (PAL), thus making Łazowertówna's biography somewhat unusual.

In the Warsaw Ghetto

During the Nazi Germany's Invasion of Poland in September 1939 part of Łazowertówna's Warsaw apartment in the ulica Sienna, which she shared with her mother, was destroyed in the strategic bombing conducted by the Luftwaffe, but it was found possible to make the remaining quarters habitable again. (Łazowertówna's father had died of natural causes before the War.)

A year after the outbreak of the Second World War Henryka Łazowertówna found herself suddenly interned in the Warsaw Ghetto, like other residents of Jewish origin in the city, though without forced resettlement — the ulica Sienna of her residence having been simply encircled by the borders of the so-called "Little Ghetto" (of the Ghetto's two parts, the North Side and the South Side, this was the South Side). As observed by Władysław Smólski (1909–1986), who visited her often during the first year of the War, the drama unfolding around her proved for Łazowertówna an opportunity to rise to the occasion displaying unhoped-for reserves of determination and strength. She immediately began collaboration with the Jewish charitable organization CENTOS whose mission was the care for orphan­ed or homeless children. Here she was recruited by Emanuel Ringelblum as a worker at his social-aid organization, the Żydowska Samopomoc Społeczna or Aleynhilf. Her duties were those of a copy-writer for the various ad hoc utilitarian publications of that charitable institution (information leaflets, appeals for donations, etc.).

She was subsequently recruited by Ringelblum to staff the Oyneg Shabbos Archives — also known as the Emanuel Ringelblum Archives in the UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme's Memory of the World Register — where she distinguished herself in her work documenting the tragic vicissitudes of fate of refugees from various parts of Poland, having been praised by Ringelblum for her remarkable ability to bring to life and instill with vivid actuality the dry statistical facts recorded for the posterity by the organization about individual human beings.

In the Ghetto she continued to write poetry. Apart from the testimony to the realities of Ghetto life memorialized in the famous poem "Mały szmugler" (The Little Smuggler), there also survives (preserved in the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature of Warsaw) the letter of Łazowertówna addressed to the poet Roman Kołoniecki (1906–1978) and dated September 6, 1941, a moving lyrical account of the Ghetto streets and the passersby to be encountered in them.

Łazowertówna had apparently no illusions that she needed outside help in order to survive: already in February or March 1940 (i.e., many months before the creation of the Ghetto), she enlisted the services of Ludwik Brandstaetter, the father of the well-known writer Roman Brandstaetter, in approaching a mutual Polish poet-friend with a request for assistance with resettlement in Cracow, a city which she believed would offer her anonymity and hence greater security. One last (bitter) comment on the ultimate fate of Łazowertówna is offered by Emanuel Ringelblum himself:

However, Władysław Smólski reports that when it became clear in the course of 1941 that the Ghetto would be eventually closed off from the outside world, many of Łazowertówna's friends counselled her to leave the precinct (together with her mother) while this was still possible, offering to find a safe house for the two of them. She apparently refused to do so, arguing that she was needed by the most unfortunate of beings, the children, orphaned or homeless, from whom she cared at the time.

During the so-called Großaktion Warschau, the mass deportations of the Warsaw Ghetto population to the Treblinka extermination camp conducted by the Nazis between July and September 1942, Henryka Łazowertówna of her own free will accompanied her mother to the Umschlagplatz or the railway loading-dock that served as a point of departure for the victims being sent to their deaths at Treblinka gas chambers some 84 kilometres to the north-east as the crow flies. The organization that employed her, the Aleynhilf, attempted to rescue Łazowertówna from being included in the transport, but when she learned that she would have to leave her mother behind Łazowertówna declined the assistance being offered to her alone.

Poetry collections

Individual poems

Prose