Building life after the war

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.