When home becomes foreign

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.