A fictionalized account of the war years appears in her novel The Journey. The two sisters survived the war in hiding, by concealing their identities. A fair haired, blue-eyed young woman, Landau did not look identifiably Jewish. The Landau family was confined to the Zbarazh ghetto until 1942, when Ida and her younger sister acquired false identity papers. In 1941, her mother died of cancer at the age of fifty. The Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, when she was eighteen years old, terminated her studies. Interested in literature and music at the university level, she studied at the Lvov Conservatory and prepared for a career as a pianist.
#Qoutes from ida fink professional#
She frequently heard antisemitic remarks and understood that the changing political climate would radically circumscribe her education and professional aspirations. The family spoke Polish and German at home, rather than Yiddish.īy the time Ida Landau began her studies in gymnasium, the Nazi presence in Poland could be felt. Fink’s younger sister, Elsa, was born in 1922. Part of the Polish intelligentsia, they had a strong sense of identity as Jews and numbered both Jews and non-Jews in their social sphere. Her father was a physician, and her mother had a doctorate in natural sciences. Theirs was a family of secular Jews, well integrated into Polish culture.
Ida Landau was born in Zbarazh, Poland (today, Ukraine) on November 1, 1921, to Ludwig and Fannie/Francisca (Stein) Landau. Her writing gives shape to the inner lives of victims and human faces to their experiences, while exposing the callousness of onlookers and the complicated motives even of rescuers.
In a very different sense, the question might be applied to Fink’s oeuvre as a whole, which, through memory and imagination, resurrects victims, survivors, perpetrators, and others connected to the Nazi genocide. Zophia’s caustic question pertains to many of the characters that populate the world of Fink’s fiction and drama-survivors struggling with memory, radical bereavement, and the aftershock of atrocity. Years later, a solitary adult, she lives in studied self-sufficiency and with a discordant cheerfulness that she understands is a “symptom,” presumably of trauma. As a child, Zophia survived the war in solitude and silence, hiding in a barn and scavenging for food under cover of darkness at night. “Did you ever see someone who was killed in the war but who is still alive?” With this trenchant remark, the central character of Ida Fink’s short story “Cheerful Zophia” encapsulates the after-effect of the Holocaust on her own life.
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