Life
Zuzanna Ginczanka was born Zuzanna Polina Ginzburg ("Gincburg" in Polish phonetic respelling) in Kiev, then part of the Russian Empire. Her Jewish parents fled the Russian Revolution, settling in 1922 in the predominantly Yiddish-speaking town of Równe, also called Równe Wołyńskie by the inhabitants, in the Kresy Wschodnie (Eastern Borderlands) of pre-War Poland (now in Western part of the Ukraine). Her father, Simon Ginzburg, was a lawyer by profession, while her mother Tsetsiliya (Цецилия) Ginzburg, née Sandberg, a housewife. Ginczanka was a holder of a Nansen passport and despite efforts made to this end was unsuccessful in obtaining Polish citizenship before the outbreak of the War. Abandoned by her father who after a divorce left for Berlin, and later by her mother who after remarriage left for Spain, she lived in the Równe home of her maternal grandmother, Klara Sandberg, by all accounts a wise and prudent woman who was responsible for her upbringing. The moderately affluent house of Klara Sandberg in the town's main street, with its ground-floor shop, was described by the writer Jerzy Andrzejewski, Ginczanka's contemporary who sought her acquaintance, and independently by the poet Jan Śpiewak, the town's fellow resident. She was called "Sana" by her closest friends. Between 1927 and 1935 she attended a state high school at Równe, the Państwowe Gimnazjum im. T. Kościuszki. In 1935 she moved to Warsaw to begin studies at Warsaw University. Her studies there soon proved impossible owing to the antisemitism raging at the University.
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“Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth below not in unison with these,—but are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust,—some of them suicides.”
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