I Survived Auschwitz by Krystyna Żywulska

Paperback:  I Survived Auschwitz (2011) was written by Krystyna Żywulska. Żywulska was born in 1914 as Sonia Landau.  During the German occupation of Poland, she was displaced with her Jewish family to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941.  She escaped from the Ghetto and became active in the Polish resistance movement.  Under her new name, Żywulska, she was captured by the Nazis in 1943 and sent to Auschwitz.

There is always the danger that we will forget things that are best not forgotten.  Certainly, some things should be permanently recorded so that posterity will remember what we would prefer to erase from our memories.

This is the story of a woman who was imprisoned for a number of years in Auschwitz, the notorious death camp.  What she saw there makes medieval genocides look like child’s play.

This is her memoir, and she shows not only her own courage but also her fellow prisoners’ fierce will to live.  Half-starved, suffering from lice, scabies and dysentery and mowed down by typhus and pneumonia, they worked in fields of icy slush and mud and registered new arrivals - hundreds of thousands of women from Holland, Greece, Italy and Hungary, who did not know where they were or why they had been seized.

That she survived and finally managed to escape to tell the tale is one of many reasons why this book should be published and widely read.  Most of her companions were murdered so that they could not bear witness.

Written just after the author’s escape and published in 1946, I Survived Auschwitz was the first ever book to emerge about the camp and therefore occupies an important place in Holocaust literature.

In certain parts of this book you will notice changes made by Poland’s communist censors after 1945. Due to these interventions, the book has become an unintentional double witness to the 20th century’s two most dreadful totalitarian regimes.

I Survived Auschwitz was published in cooperation with the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.  With additional footnotes, 26 percent increase in text, and 45 photos taken during war, the new edition is greatly expanded compared to the original 1946 English version.

The book was translated from the Polish, Przeżyłam Oświęcim, by Lech Czerski and Sheila Callahan based on an initial translation by Krystyna Cenkalska.

About the author:  Krystyna Żywulska, born Sonia Landau to Jewish parents in Lódz, Poland, walked out of the Warsaw ghetto in August 1942.  She joined the resistance as Zofia Wisniewska and provided aid to Jews in hiding, assuming yet another fictitious identity when arrested by the Nazis in June 1943.  Two months later, she was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau as a Polish political prisoner. There, she began to write poems and songs, becoming one of a group of amateur poets and musicians who created “unofficial” art.

In 1970, Zywulska moved to Düsseldorf to be with her sons, who had earlier emigrated to the West as a result of the 1968 anti-Semitic campaigns in Poland.  Asked by the Polish psychologist and scholar Barbara Engelking near the end of her life whether Krystyna was her real name, she replied, “In my life, when it comes to such topics, there is nothing ‘true,’ my dear.”  But in truth, she was “Zosia” to family and friends from before the war and “Krysia” to her friends who survived Birkenau.  They loved her all the same.

She died on 1 August 1992, and is buried in Germany as Zofia Zywulska Andrzejewski.  Those who had been closest to her, both family and friends, remember Zywulska as a woman who loved to laugh, sing, and jest.  Perhaps befitting a woman endowed with such optimism and spirit - as well as a gift for pictorial description - in the last decade of her life, without training and with impressive success, Zywulska took up painting, fulfilling a life-long desire.