Writing herself back into past

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.