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from Part II - Searching for the Purpose of Suffering: Despair—Accusation—Hope
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2018
Stanisław Wygodzki was born in 1907 in Będzin, Poland. Wygodzki, a Polish writer of Jewish origin, was expelled from school at the age of sixteen for communist agitation. He then joined the banned Communist Party and was imprisoned between 1925 and 1927 on account of his membership. He was a member of the International Union of Revolutionary Authors and translated the works of German poets, including Brecht, Tucholsky, and Erich Kästner, into Polish. Wygodzki published the first two collections of his own poetry in 1933–34 and 1936. In 1942, he was sent to the Będzin Ghetto. He, his wife, and their four-year-old daughter were deported to Auschwitz concentration camp the following year. His parents and two of his brothers were also sent there soon after. The writer's entire family—his parents, brothers, wife, and daughter—were murdered in Auschwitz. Stanisław Wygodzki, the only one to survive, was transferred to Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen concentration camp and eventually to Dachau (prisoner number 127,924) and its external camps at Kaufering and Allach. He was liberated from the camp of Allach on April 29, 1945.
During his period in the concentration camps, Stanisław Wygodzki had no opportunity to fix his thoughts on paper: “That was impossible … no writing implements or materials were available,” he said in 1989. His volume of poetry, Pamiętnik miłości (Diary of Love), was written only after his liberation in 1945 while in hospital in Gauting near Munich. It was dedicated to his murdered relatives. Some of these poems had already been mentally conceived in Auschwitz, as Wygodzki related in characterizing the volume, for which he had received several award s, in 1989: “I could only store these poems in my mind … it was a final conversation with my wife, with my daughter, with my parents—I did not write poems, I only talked to the victims of murder one last time—it was a spontaneous and final conversation with those I loved most.”
In Gauting, Stanisław Wygodzki met his second wife, Irena, who had been through similar experiences. They married while he was still in Gauting. Tadeusz Borowski (biography, p. 219), the young Polish writer Wygodzki had met at the Munich-Freimann displaced persons camp after the liberation, acted as a witness to the wedding.
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