Urn

Stanislaw Wygodzki was born in Bedzin, Silesia, Poland, to a deeply Zionist family. However, as a young man, he was drawn to radical ideals of internationalism and, in the 1920s, was jailed for his communist activities. In 1933, he published his first political poetry volume, Roll Call, which was soon followed by A Leaf’s Element (1936). A survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau, Wygodzki lost his entire family during the Holocaust. After the war, he remained in Poland and became a prominent translator of Yiddish, as well as a Polish writer of poems and short stories, primarily about children and the Holocaust. In 1968, he immigrated to Israel as a result of the increasing antisemitism of communist Poland.