Stefania Zahorska

[2][3] Zahorska was born Stefania Ernestyna Leser in Kraków (then part of Austria-Hungary) to a family of assimilated, middle class Polish Jews; some sources have put her year of birth as 1890.

[2] Zahorska entered medical school where she studied for two or three years, before dropping out and enrolling in the art history department at Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

She was the permanent collaborator of Wiadomości Literackie, professor at the Wolna Wszechnica Polska in Warsaw, and co-founder of the Polish Writers Association Ltd in London.

She was a pioneer in the young field of film criticism in Poland, noting the "military romanticism" and "exaggerated melodrama" as the two dominating themes in Polish cinema.

She noted that if such films "were to be shown abroad (and they shouldn't be) they would present to the amazed world a Poland still immersed in the madness of war, its high excitement, and military idealisms".