Zuzanna Ginczanka - NON OMNIS MORIAR

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments, love is not love
When it does not love the neighbour and all his belongings
Always ready those belongings to remove.
You, Mrs. Chominowa, you are my neighbour
You will inherit my things after I am taken.
I have no worldly heir, you have grassed on me
In order to speed up my journey to heaven.
Soon you’ll be ready to search for that Jewish gold
It must be hidden in quilts and pillows of down.
You’ll rip them open, and the feathers from the pillows
Will stick to your hands and arms, still wet with my blood.

With those hands like wings you will be an angel
And you'll be ready to fly straight to Heaven.

Translated by W.F.

Zuzanna Ginczanka (pron. Zoozanna Geenchankah) (1917-1944)

Zuzanna Ginczanka was born in 1917 in Kiev as Zuzanna Polina Gincburg. Soon after the Russian Revolution her parents moved to Rowne, which was then in a newly created Republic of Poland (it is in Ukraine now). Rowne was a town whose majority of inhabitants spoke Yiddish, but Zuzanna's parents were emancipated Jews and spoke Russian at home. Thus she had a choice of a language: either Yiddish of the shtetl, Russian of her parents or Polish of her school friends. Fascinated by Polish poetry, she chose Polish and wanted to become a Polish poet. She started publishing her poems when still at school. During her studies in Warsaw she entered literary circles; one of her friends was Witold Gombrowicz, another Julian Tuwim. She published her works mostly in periodicals, only one book of poems appeared before the war. As a pen-name she used half of her Jewish surname with a Polish ending.

During the war she lived at first in Lvov, later in Cracow. Her life is a perfect example of the tension between the Polish underground state, which tried to protect its Jewish citizens, and some of the anti-Semitic Poles, who co-operated with the Nazi authorities. As a fluent Polish speaker she could pass for a non-Jew (most Yiddish speakers spoke Polish with a strong accent), and her friends, who were involved in resistance, found her a new identity. However, her neighbour in Lvov, one Mrs. Chominowa, reported to the Nazis that a Jewish woman lived next door and they came to arrest her. Zuzanna's Polish friends managed to spirit her away in time and she moved to Cracow. There she was arrested again, this time as a member of the resistance, not as a Jew. She was executed in 1944, not long before Russian troops entered Cracow.

Her most famous poem – NON OMNIS MORIAR – is really impossible to translate, most of all because this is really a paraphrase of a well known Polish poem written by Juliusz Slowacki, one of the great authors of old Polish poetry. It is as if someone took one of Shakespeare's sonnets and paraphrased it. Which is exactly what I have done in the translation proposed above.