Henryka Łazowertówna (; in full Henryka Wanda Łazowertówna); also Henryka Lazowert, or incorrectly Lazawert, (19 June 1909 – August 1942) was a Polish lyric poet. While in general deeply personal in nature and of great emotive intensity, her poetry is not devoid of social concerns and patriotic overtones. She is considered one of the eminent Polish authors of Jewish descent.Grand Larousse encyclopédique, (see "Pologne") Henryka Łazowertówna. The French encyclopaedia.
To the reading public she is known as the author of the poem "Mały szmugler" (The Little Smuggler), written in the Warsaw Ghetto c.1941 and first published posthumously in 1947. The poem deals with the subject of a child struggling single-handedly to keep his family alive in the Ghetto by smuggling provisions from the "Aryan" side at the risk of his own life. A poem begins with the stanza also known from an adaptive translation provided by Richard C. Lukas. It reads as follows: Przez mury, przez dziury, przez warty Przez druty, przez gruzy, przez płot Zgłodniały, zuchwały, uparty Przemykam, przebiegam jak kot.Henryka Łazowertówna, "Mały szmugler" (The Little Smuggler; lines 1–4); in: Pieśń ujdzie cało...: antologia wierszy o Żydach pod okupacją niemiecką, comp., ed., & introd. M M. Borwicz, Warsaw, [n.p.], 1947, pp. 115–116.Past rubble, fence, barbed wire Past soldiers guarding the Wall, Starving but still defiant, I softly steal past them all.Richard C. Lukas, Did the Children Cry?: Hitler's War against Jewish and Polish Children, 1939–1945, New York City, Hippocrene Books, 1994, p. 31. .
The original text of the poem, together with translations in English and in Hebrew, is today inscribed on the Memorial to the Child Victims of the Holocaust (Pomnik Pamięci Dzieci in Warsaw), serving as the epitaph for the million children murdered in the Holocaust.
Life Henryka Łazowertówna was the daughter of Maksymilian Łazowert and his wife Bluma. Her mother was a schoolteacher.Władysław Smólski, "Tragiczny los poetki" (The Tragic Fate of a Poetess), Stolica (Warsaw), vol. 20, No. 14 (904), 4 April 1965, p. 16. 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."Uroczysta akademja ku czci Stefana Żeromskiego" (A Solemn Ceremony in Honour of Stefan Żeromski), Tygodnik Illustrowany (Warsaw), vol. 76, No. 49 (3,965), 8 December 1935, p. 976. (See online.) 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,Henryka Łazowertówna, Zamknięty pokój, Warsaw, Nasza Bibljoteka, 1930, p. 52. 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.Kazimierz Andrzej Jaworski, "Noty", Kamena, vol. 1, No. 9, May 1934, pp. 170–171. 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).Karol Wiktor Zawodziński, Opowieści o powieśći, ed. Cz. Zgorzelski, Kraków, Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1963, p. 261. Cf. Władysław Smólski, "Tragiczny los poetki" (The Tragic Fate of a Poetess), Stolica (Warsaw), vol. 20, No. 14 (904), 4 April 1965, p. 16.
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.Józef Łobodowski, "O cyganach i katastrofistach" (About the Bohemians and the Catastrophists), Kultura (Paris), No. 9, 1964, pp. 59–68. 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.Tadeusz K. Gierymski, "O tym nie można ani mówić, ani milczeć" (A Subject Unfit to be Talked About or to be Passed Over in Silence), Spojrzenia (ezine), No. 123, 28 April 1995. ISSN 1067-4020. (See online.)
She lived in Warsaw with her mother in the ulica Sienna.Edward Kozikowski, Więcej prawdy niż plotki: wspomnienia o pisarzach czasów minionych, Warsaw, Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1964, p. 425.
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.Eugenia Prokop-Janiec, Polish–Jewish Literature in the Interwar Years tr. A. Shenitzer, Syracuse (New York), Syracuse University Press, 2003, pp. 94–95, 109. . 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.Tadeusz K. Gierymski, "O tym nie można ani mówić, ani milczeć" (A Subject Unfit to be Talked About or to be Passed Over in Silence), Spojrzenia (ezine), No. 123, 28 April 1995. ISSN 1067-4020. (See online.) On CENTOS (or Centos; "The Central Organization for Orphan Care"), see Barbara Engelking & Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, tr. E. Harris, New Haven (Connecticut), Yale University Press, 2009, p. 341. , . 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.).Samuel D. Kassow, Who will Write Our History?: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, Bloomington (Indiana), Indiana University Press, 2007, p. 181. , .
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.Samuel D. Kassow, Who will Write Our History?: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, Bloomington (Indiana), Indiana University Press, 2007, pp. 181–182. , .
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 6 September 1941, a moving lyrical account of the Ghetto streets and the passersby to be encountered in them.The Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature, shelf mark 2235, vol. 2. Cf. Piotr Matywiecki, Kamień graniczny, Warsaw, Latona, 1994, pp. 196, 276. .
Łazowertówna had apparently no illusions that she needed outside help in order to survive: already in February or March 1940 (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 Krakóww, a city which she believed would offer her anonymity and hence greater security.Edward Kozikowski, Więcej prawdy niż plotki: wspomnienia o pisarzach czasów minionych, Warsaw, Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1964, p. 431. One last (bitter) comment on the ultimate fate of Łazowertówna is offered by Emanuel Ringelblum himself: Łazowertówna was ill with a lung condition; however without a substantial amount of money in cash, without some ten thousand zlotys or so, one could not dream of [crossing over to] the Aryan side... she had lots of Polish friends, after all they honoured her with many an authorial evening reception, she was a member of the Polish Writers' Union despite all this there wasn't anyone in the end to save her...