BALLADA O SLEPYM MAKSIE

Lodz; Biblioteka "tygla Kultury, 1998. Softbound. 8vo. 181 pages. 25 cm. First edition. In Polish. "Arnold Mostowicz was born in 1914, the only son of a middle-class Jewish family. He grew up in Lodz which, before the German invasion, had a population of at least a quarter of a million Jews and was a prominent and prosperous centre. At the age of 19, and because ‘as a Jew I did not have a chance of studying medicine at a Polish university, ' he travelled to France and enrolled as a medical student. Upon completing his studies he returned to Poland in July 1939, and when, in September, all young men were called to defend Poland against the Nazi invasion, he packed up two shirts, a jar of home-made jam and a volume of poems and walked to Warsaw to join the war. During the siege of Warsaw, Mostowicz worked as a physician in the Child Jesu Hospital where he treated victims of the German air raids. When Warsaw capitulated, Mostowicz returned to Lodz and the ghetto. There he worked in the isolation department of the hospital, and took part in the resistance movement. By the end of the war almost all of the ghetto's inhabitants were gone - either dead from starvation and exhaustion or sent to death camps. Mostowicz himself was deported, in 1944, to Auschwitz, before being moved to the Gross Rosen concentration camp from which he was liberated in May 1945. Most of his family, including his parents, perished at Treblinka and at other camps. For a time after the war Mostowicz ran a hospital but he soon turned his back on medicine and devoted himself to writing. He was editor of the satirical Polish magazine Szpilki, before being ousted in an anti-Semitic Communist purge in 1968. Mostowicz wrote science fiction and books about Lodz, as well as an autobiographical memoir, The Yellow Star (1989) . In 1994, he founded the Monumentum Judaicum Lodzense Association, to maintain the cultural heritage of Lodz's Jews. " (The Telegraph, 2/8/2002) Subjects: Jews -- Poland -- Lodz -- Biography. Borensztain, Max. Lodz (Poland) -- Biography.. OCLC lists 4 copies worldwide. (CT State University, Florida Atlantic Univ, HUC, Natl. Libr of Israel. ) Occasional pencil marking in text, inscription on title page. Very good + condition. Difficult to find. (HOLO2-107-12).