Ida Fink was born in Zbaraż (today Zbarazh, Ukraine) into a wealthy, assimilated, secularised Jewish family. Until recently, her works were obligatory reading in Polish schools.
She has received many awards, including the Special Prize of the Polish PEN Club, the Alberto Moravia Award, and the Yad Vashem Institute Award. Still, the works she did publish have been translated into over a dozen languages. Ida Fink’s output is not abundant – one novel: The Journey (Polish: Podróż, 1990), and collections of short stories titled A Scrap of Time and Other Stories (Polish: Skrawek czasu, 1987) and Traces (Polish: Ślady, 1996), The Garden That Floated Away (Polish: Odpływający ogród, 2002) and Spring 1941 (Polish: Wiosna 1941, 2009). Nevertheless, she still showed a great deal by naming her victims and depicting individual fates of people in particular circumstances. She never touched on the so-called ‘grand themes’ associated with the question of why the Holocaust happened. In an almost tangible way, they introduce readers to the world created by the Nazis – the anti-world, as literary critics describe it. They show snippets, scraps of reality carrying an intense accumulation of content, above all scenes of cruelty. Incidentally, they also have a special place in the entirety of literature about the Holocaust. Short stories were her literary form of choice. She described the experiences of Jews hiding on the so-called Aryan side, between the Polish population and the German occupier. Ida Fink (1921–2011) is placed alongside such writers and witnesses of the Holocaust as Tadeusz Borowski, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Charlotte Delbo.
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