Between Homes, Languages and Identities

Krystyna Modrzewska grew up in an assimilated Jewish family in pre-war Poland and later reflected deeply on her Jewish background, gender and sense of difference. Her studies in Bologna became an important period of self-discovery before the outbreak of war forced her back to Poland.

Krystyna Modrzewska was born on 14 September 1919 in Warsaw as Krystyna Mandelbaum. Her father, Hersz Jakub Mandelbaum, was a doctor and a Bund activist and, before the war, the last head physician of the Jewish hospital in Lublin. Her mother, Franciszka, was a pianist and music teacher. In 1929, the family moved from Warsaw to Lublin, where they lived at 9 Bernardyńska Street.

Krystyna grew up in an assimilated Jewish family closely connected to Polish culture and language. Jewish identity in her home was not associated with religious practice. Years later, she recalled:

Her sense of difference, however, was not limited to her Jewish background. In the autobiographical books she wrote towards the end of her life, Modrzewska returned to her childhood and adolescence, describing her experience of her body and gender. In Trzy razy Lublin (Three Times Lublin), she wrote about growing up without identifying with the femininity assigned to her:

Modrzewska also recalled dressing in her father’s suit as a teenager. She did not present this simply as a youthful rejection of fashion. In later life, she connected these memories with what she described as her “transsexual nature”. In her own writing, her experience of gender became one of the central elements through which she understood herself.

In Trzy razy Lublin, she described her years as a student in Bologna as a period of discovering the world and other people, but above all of discovering herself:

In 1937, she began studying natural sciences at the University of Bologna. Her move to Italy was her first experience of living outside Poland for an extended period. While in Bologna, she was baptised into the Catholic Church. As she later recorded in her diary, this was not a pragmatic decision. Modrzewska regarded her baptism as a serious decision concerning her faith and identity.

Her time in Bologna also played an important role in her personal development. She later described it as a period in which she first began to understand her own sense of difference. At the time, however, she had neither the language with which to name it nor a social environment in which she could safely live it.

The outbreak of war interrupted her studies. She returned from Italy to Poland and found herself in a reality in which her origins, her name and her ability to move freely would become matters of survival.

Resisting in everyday life - The war and life under an assumed name

During the occupation, Modrzewska survived under an assumed Polish identity while working, moving between places of refuge and participating in the underground resistance. She also tried to help others escape persecution, while navigating the complex intersections of her Jewish identity, gender and personal relationships.

After returning to Lublin, Modrzewska and her mother found themselves in immediate danger. During the occupation, she used the Polish surname Modrzewska. The name, which initially helped to conceal her Jewish identity, became part of her identity for many years.

Her experience of the war was, from the beginning, an experience of living between different identities. As Krystyna Mandelbaum, she belonged to the Jewish population persecuted by the Germans. As Krystyna Modrzewska, she lived on “Aryan papers” and had to convincingly present herself as Polish. At the same time, she was already struggling with a sense of gender identity that she could not easily place within the categories available to her. Later interpretations of her biography have therefore examined the intersection of her Polish, Jewish and queer identities.

Her wartime experience was one of constant tension: moving from place to place, hiding, obtaining documents and working. In 1941, she was sworn into the Home Army (Armia Krajowa), using the codename “Kret” (“Mole”). She also worked in the occupation administration, which gave her access to information and documents.

From 1943 onwards, she worked as an official in the county administration in Garwolin. She used her position for underground activities, including preparing documents for people at risk of arrest. At the same time, she tried to help others. During the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, she managed to get out and attempted to rescue relatives and friends.

In her 1999 oral history interview, she recalled:

Her wartime relationships with women also had a personal dimension. In her account of the friend she helped escape from the ghetto, Modrzewska used deeply emotional language. She described her as “the most beautiful ideal” and later wrote about the pain associated with their relationship after the deaths of those close to her.

Contemporary categories should not, however, be imposed automatically on these wartime relationships. The sources do allow us to observe that women and relationships with women occupied a particularly important place in Modrzewska’s account of her own life.

A diary that was not allowed to speak in full

Written in 1947, Modrzewska’s wartime diary offers an early account of hiding, survival and everyday life under occupation. Its later censorship, documented by Jacek Leociak, also reveals how personal testimonies of the Holocaust could themselves become subject to political and institutional control.

Modrzewska’s diary is one of the earliest records of her wartime experience. It was written in 1947, only a few years after the events it describes. It was therefore not a recollection written decades later, but an attempt to record her experience soon after the end of the war. Modrzewska submitted the diary to the Central Jewish Historical Commission.

The diary has a particular history. Fragments were not published until 1959 and 1960, in three consecutive issues of the Bulletin of the Jewish Historical Institute. The text was censored, however. The interventions went far beyond the removal of individual sentences. Entire sections concerning the convent, Modrzewska’s relationship with the nuns and her critical assessment of their behaviour were removed. Passages concerning antisemitism and the experiences of Jews during the occupation were also subject to censorship.

The diary presents hiding not as a single dramatic event, but as months of everyday activities: working, waiting, finding money, looking for another place to stay and adapting to circumstances over which Modrzewska had very limited control.

The diary does not portray her as a passive person hiding from the Holocaust. It shows a woman who worked, made decisions, negotiated her circumstances, observed the people around her and tried to retain her independence even when her possibilities were severely restricted.

Source: Jacek Leociak, “Cenzor na straży Kościoła. Ocenzurowany pamiętnik Krystyny Modrzewskiej”, Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, no. 5, 2009, pp. 371–393.

Building life after the war: Scientist, doctor, writer

After surviving the war and losing much of her family, Modrzewska rebuilt her life through science, medicine and writing. Her academic career and the use of the male pseudonym Adam Struś also became important ways of negotiating her professional and gender identities.

In September 1944, Modrzewska returned to Lublin. The war was coming to an end, but her life could not return to its pre-war shape. Most of her family had been murdered, and the world in which she had grown up had ceased to exist.

She soon rebuilt her life around science.

In 1947–1948, she worked at the Department of Anthropology at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University. In 1948, she received a doctorate in natural sciences. She subsequently worked in Poznań and, from 1950, in Białystok, where she simultaneously studied medicine. After completing her medical degree, she returned to Lublin. From 1964, she headed the Department of Anthropology at UMCS.

She combined her academic research with writing. During the 1960s, she published fiction under the pseudonym Adam Struś.

The pseudonym was not simply a literary disguise. Modrzewska wrote as a man, using the first person singular. Her wartime experiences were thus rewritten through a male protagonist. Researchers of her biography have identified this as one of the earliest ways in which Modrzewska attempted to express her experience of gender.

This does not mean that Adam Struś can be directly identified with Modrzewska’s later gender identity. It is, however, an important part of her long search for a language through which she could describe herself.

In her post-war life, work was therefore not merely a way of rebuilding stability. It became the foundation of a new identity.

Between Homes, Languages and Identities, March 1968

The antisemitic campaign of 1968 transformed Modrzewska’s relationship with Poland and ultimately forced her to leave the country she had called home. Her emigration meant not only crossing a border, but losing her professional position, social world and sense of security.

By 1968, Modrzewska was an established scientist and head of a university department. Nearly three decades had passed since the end of the war, most of which she had spent in Poland.

The antisemitic campaign of 1968 once again placed her Jewish origins at the centre of public and professional life. Political and professional pressure led her to consider leaving the country.

In Czas przedostatni (The Penultimate Time), published in 1992, she described the final months before emigration as a gradual process of separation from the life she had built:

It was not a single moment of decision. Leaving was a process.

It is important not to present her emigration as simply a free choice to begin a new life elsewhere. Modrzewska left Poland as a consequence of the antisemitic campaign of 1967–1968. Her migration was shaped by political pressure and exclusion. She left as a mature scientist, doctor and writer, after having spent almost her entire life in Poland.

Her departure therefore meant losing far more than a place of residence. It meant leaving behind her professional environment, academic position, language and social world — everything she had built over decades.

Elsewhere, she wrote about the flat that had ceased to feel safe, and about objects, books and furniture that suddenly lost their former meaning. She remembered people who had been expelled or forced to flee during the war and recognised something of their fate in her own experience.

She expressed the transformation of her relationship with her city most starkly:

In June 1970, she left for Sweden.

The first days in Sweden - A refugee

At the age of 51, Modrzewska arrived in Sweden as a refugee, suddenly reduced from an established academic to a person waiting for the authorities to decide her future. Learning Swedish, finding work and navigating a new society became the first steps towards rebuilding her life.

Her account of her arrival in Sweden is among the most concrete records of migration in her writing. After leaving Poland, she arrived in Ystad. She had two suitcases and little money. She was taken to a refugee centre, where she was registered by the Swedish authorities.

Modrzewska described this change in status in striking terms:

This experience contrasted sharply with her previous life. She arrived in Sweden as a woman in her early fifties, with a doctorate, academic experience and many years of university work behind her. In her new country, however, she was no longer a professor or head of a department. She was a refugee waiting for the authorities to decide her future.

Emigration also meant entering another world of social categories that determined who one could be and how one could be perceived. Modrzewska had already experienced concealing her Jewish identity during the war and living with a sense of incongruity between herself and the gender assigned to her. Now she had to find her place as a Polish and Jewish emigrant in Sweden.

From the first days of her emigration, she concentrated on learning Swedish. Together with other refugees, she attended language classes. She described the initial experience of the language as one of complete helplessness: she could not understand the words, could not reproduce them, and the sounds of the new language seemed entirely unfamiliar.

At the same time, one question occupied the refugees in the camp: what would happen next?

Modrzewska wrote about uncertainty over employment and where she would eventually live. Among the refugees, reports circulated about hostility towards foreigners and concerns about jobs and housing.

This was the beginning of another stage in her life: first she had to learn the language, then find work, and finally rebuild the professional position she had spent decades establishing in Poland.

Starting again at fifty-one: Work after emigration

In Sweden, Modrzewska had to reconstruct an academic career she had already established in Poland, eventually earning a second doctorate and returning to scientific research. Her experience of academic recognition also became intertwined with her increasingly explicit understanding of her gender identity.

In 1970, Modrzewska was 51. In Poland, before the antisemitic campaign, she had headed the Department of Anthropology at UMCS. In Sweden, she began again from a position far below her previous professional standing.

In 1971, she began working at the Institute of Clinical Genetics at Uppsala University. She gradually returned to scientific research, including research into the genetic factors associated with schizophrenia. In 1980, she received a doctorate in medical sciences, and in the following year she became a docent. She retired in 1985.

This required her to re-enter academia, this time in another language and another country. Her second doctorate had a significance beyond the formal acquisition of another academic degree. In Na krawędzi chaosu (On the Edge of Chaos), she returned to the question of why she had sought another doctorate when she had already received one in 1948.

Modrzewska also wrote about the university ceremony at which doctors were formally awarded their degrees and about the academic cap placed on the head of the person being honoured. This detail had a deeply personal significance connected to her experience of gender. She wrote that, for a “transvestite”, wearing the cap publicly as part of the ceremony meant more than an academic ritual: she described it as a “triumph” of her most personal truth.

This passage is particularly significant because it shows how her return to an academic career in Sweden became intertwined with a later, increasingly conscious articulation of her gender identity. It was not only about regaining professional status. The doctorate also offered an opportunity to publicly experience something that had remained concealed for much of her earlier life.

Emigration did not end her career. It forced her to once again undertake a difficult journey that she had already made before.

Language and Belonging - Polish and Swedish

Modrzewska lived and worked between languages: Swedish became the language of her professional life, while Polish remained the language of memory and writing. Later, learning Hebrew became a way of reconnecting with a Jewish heritage that had played little role in her childhood in an assimilated family.

Swedish became the language of her professional life. Polish remained the language in which she wrote, remembered and made sense of her past.

In her oral history interview, she said:

Later in life, she also began learning Hebrew. In 1999, she explained:

Her relationship with language therefore changed throughout her life. Polish was the language of her childhood and education, of literature and memory. Swedish became the language of her professional life in exile. Hebrew appeared later as an attempt to turn towards a heritage with which her assimilated family had had little connection.

Language was also a tool through which she could speak about gender. For many years, Modrzewska lacked a language with which she could directly describe her experience. Her later autobiographies are therefore not simply memoirs, but attempts to find words for something which, as she herself wrote, had remained difficult to understand and accept for most of her life.

Writing herself back into past: Memory, Lublin and retugn

In exile, Modrzewska returned repeatedly to her past through autobiographical writing and visits to Lublin. Writing became a way of revisiting displacement, memory, gender and belonging, and of making sense of a life lived between countries, languages and identities.

In exile, Modrzewska began to write with increasing intensity about the past.

She returned to Poland for the first time after 17 years. Later, she visited Lublin regularly. Her books — Trzy razy Lublin (1991), Czas przedostatni (1992), Na krawędzi chaosu (1994), Dom przy Bernardyńskiej (1999) and Z Bolonii do Uppsali (2002) — were written from the perspective of a life lived between Poland and Sweden.

Writing became a way of revisiting her own biography. Modrzewska returned to the same events, but each time she was able to name them differently. In her later books, the history of her gender identity also became increasingly explicit.

In Na krawędzi chaosu, she wrote about two of the most important truths of her life. The first was what she called a “full awareness of my own difference” and the resulting sense of not fitting in “in a purely biological sense, and consequently also in a social sense”. She also described feelings of guilt, suicidal thoughts and reading Magnus Hirschfeld, through whom she first realised that she was not the only person to experience such a profound sense of difference.

Her writing was not simply a record of what had happened in the past. It was also an attempt to understand herself.

In her 1999 oral history interview, she said:

Writing allowed her to return to successive places and successive versions of her own biography: Warsaw in her childhood, pre-war Lublin, Bologna, occupied Poland, the post-war university and Sweden.

It was not, however, a return to one lost home.

Her life unfolded between different places, languages, names and ways of understanding her own identity. Migration was not a single event in her life, but a repeated experience of displacement and of having to rebuild herself. First, the war forced her to conceal her origins and live under an assumed name. Later, the antisemitic campaign forced her to leave the country in which she had spent most of her life. In Sweden, she had to rebuild her professional position, learn a new language and find her place in a new society.

At the same time, it was only from the perspective of later life that she could increasingly articulate another form of alienation, her experience of her own body and gender, which had accompanied her since childhood.

Krystyna Modrzewska died in Sweden on 27 August 2008.