[1] Working as a schoolteacher, she wrote theatre plays, short stories, biographies, and novels dealing with the history of the Sorbian people.

The collection's eponymous story relates the execution of a Polish forced labourer who had fallen in love with a Sorbian woman during the war.

Marja Kubašec was born in March 1890 in Quoos [de], a village near Bautzen in the Kingdom of Saxony (then part of the German Empire).

Her parents were catholic farmers and members of the Sorbian minority, a West Slavic ethnic group living in the German-Polish border region of Lusatia.

[2] From 1902 to 1909, after attending a school in Radibor, she received her teacher training with a focus on history and foreign languages at the Ursulinenkloster Erfurt [de].

[2] After the end of the Second World War, Kubašec was suspended from her teaching post because of her membership in the Nazi Party[3] and instead began working for Domowina, an organisation promoting the interest of the Sorbs.

The collection's eponymous story relates the execution of a Polish forced labourer who had fallen in love with a Sorbian woman during the war.

[5] In the 1960s, she engaged with the lives of two Sorbs who had resisted the government of Adolf Hitler:[2] her biographies of the writer Maria Grollmuß (1960) and the catholic priest Alojs Andritzki (1967) went through several editions in Sorbian and German.

[3] Kubašec is considered by literary historian as the first woman to write novels in Upper Sorbian, the language of the Sorbs in Germany.