The directory «Plots»

Kossak-Szczucka Zofia
(1890—1968)

Polish author and resistance fighter, is best known for her wartime efforts to help the Polish Jews. She was a founder of the wartime Polish organization Żegota, set up to assist Polish Jews in escaping the Holocaust. In 1943 she was arrested by the Germans and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, but survived the war.

Zofia Kossak was a granddaughter of the Polish painter Juliusz Kossak. She married twice, and kept the name Szczucka from her first marriage. She was associated with the Czartak literary group, and wrote mainly for the Catholic press. Her best-known work from that period is Conflagration, a memoir of the Russian Revolution of 1917. In 1936 she received the Gold Laurel (Złoty Wawrzyn) of the Polish Academy of Literature.
During the German occupation of Poland, Kossak-Szczucka worked in the underground press: from 1939 to 1941 she co-edited the underground newspaper, Polska żyje (Poland Lives) and in 1941 co-founded the Catholic organization, Front for the Rebirth of Poland and edited its newspaper, Prawda (The Truth). In the underground, she used the code-name Weronika (Veronica).

Despite already being the target of an intensive Gestapo search, she exposed herself to the added danger of helping the Jews. Her motivation was moral, humanitarian and patriotic. She regarded the Germans' actions, she said, as an offense against man and God, and their policies as an affront to the ideals that she espoused for an independent Poland.

Poland, 1993, Zofia Kossak