Maria Kuryluk

Shortly after World War II started in September 1939, Miriam Kohany fled with her husband and elder brother from Bielsko-Biała to Lwów (today Lviv in Ukraine) with a group of young people, dispersed on the way.

In 1942 Miriam Kohany escaped from the Lvov ghetto and survived, as did her husband Teddy Gleich, on the Aryan side with the help of Karol Kuryluk, a member of the resistance.

In 1944, with the Red Army closing on Lvov, she acted as liaison and ventured into the for-Germans-only parts of the city distributing leaflets calling on Wehrmacht soldiers to desert.

Her job's difficulty is evidenced by the military censorship stamp on the envelope of André Malraux's letter of 4 August 1945, responding to Maria Kuryluk's request to contribute an excerpt of his novel to "Odrodzenie".

Unpublished, however, remained her principle early work, a long wartime memoirs with autobiographical elements entitled Zdzisław Bieliński (c. 1946): the name of a Lvov doctor who saved Jews along with his wife Zofia Bielińska.

The Bieliński couple was later declared as Righteous among the Nations of the World by Yad Vashem, but their heroic deeds became known in detail only recently, when Ewa Kuryluk discovered and published excerpts from her mother's memoirs in her novel Frascati[1] (2009).

In the fall of 1946, soon after the birth of her daughter Ewa in May, the Kielce Pogrom in July, and the sudden and still-unexplained death of Teddy Gleich in August, Maria Kuryluk fell into deep depression and developed schizophrenia.

[3] Maria Kuryluk's short stories, journalism and translations into Polish were published in the magazines "Odrodzenie", "Nowa Kultura" and "Zeszyty Literackie".

[4] Miriam Kohany's writings in German, an impressive amount of prose fragments and over one hundred poems written before and during World War II, constitute a tragic testimony of a hidden life.