A Scrap of Time (Skrawek czasu)

Abstract

About the Author: Ida Fink (1921–2011) was born as Ida Landau in Zbarazh, East Galicia (after the war USSR, now Ukraine) to a family of secular Jews that was integrated into Polish culture. In 1938 she started studying at the Lviv Conservatory, but the German invasion of USSR in 1941 interrupted her studies. Ida Landau was confined to the Zbarazh Ghetto with her family until 1942, when she and her younger sister Elsa acquired “Aryan papers” and travelled to Germany as Polish forced labourers. A fair haired, blue-eyed young Ida did not look identifiably Jewish, quite the opposite of her sister. They both survived. A fictionalised account of the war years appears in her novel The Journey (1990). Ida and Elsa spent almost a year in the Displaced Person Camp Ettlingen where she made her writing debut with an essay in the camp newspaper Nasz głos. In 1946, they came back to Poland and stayed in Silesia. In 1948 Ida married Bruno Fink, a survivor of four camps. In 1957, the whole family moved to Israel and settled in Holon. Ida Fink immediately started to publish her short stories in various Polish language periodicals in Israel and the UK. In the 1960s she worked for the Yad Vashem Institute as a testimony recorder, in the 1970s as a librarian in the music section of the Goethe Institute in Tel Aviv. Since the late 1980s, her prose has gained great popularity and won many important literary awards. All her life Fink wrote in Polish.