Polish Auschwitz survivor Zofia Posmysz dies at 98

Zofia Posmysz, a Polish WWII resistance fighter who survived Auschwitz and Ravensbrück concentration camps and later became a journalist and novelist, has died aged 98

Warsaw, Poland — Zofia Posmysz, a Polish World War II resistance fighter who survived the Auschwitz and Ravensbrück concentration camps and later became a journalist and novelist, has died aged 98.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Memorial Museum said Posmysz died Monday in a hospice in Oświęcim, the southern Polish town where Auschwitz was located during Nazi Germany’s occupation of Poland.

She would have been 99 in two weeks.

Posmysz, a Polish Roman Catholic, was born on August 23, 1923 in Krakow.

She was 18 when she was arrested in 1942 for her association with the Polish resistance in Krakow. After spending more than two years in the Auschwitz death camp, she was deported to Ravensbrück and then later to Neustadt-Glewe, where she was released at the end of the war in 1945, the memorial said. Auschwitz.

She returned to Poland after the war, working as a journalist, notably for Polish radio, and writing several novels. Her most famous work was called “The Passenger”, a novel she first wrote as a radio play called “The Passenger in Cabin 45”. It tells the story of an Auschwitz survivor who meets her former concentration camp guard on a boat trip, and has been the basis for a film and an opera.

In 2006, she was one of the former prisoners who hosted Pope Benedict XVI, of German origin, in the former Auschwitz camp.

Comments are closed.