Nursery

Elli Rostow, a young girl from the upper echelons of Polish Jewish bourgeoisie, finds herself and her family in the midst of the unbearable poverty and hopelessness of the Warsaw ghetto following the arrival of the German occupiers. She later gets out and works as a Polish woman with forged documents for a German employer.

In revealing the characters' personalities and depicting the plot twists, the author draws on her own life experiences in Poland during the Second World War.

Her work is convincing because it is truthful even in the most cruel and, at the same time, most absurd situations that the era brought.

Illustration: Vladimír Wagner.

Elżbieta Ettinger, a writer of Jewish origin, was born in Poland in 1925. During the Second World War, she worked under a false identity in the Polish resistance movement. As one of the few to survive the Holocaust, she managed to escape from the besieged Warsaw ghetto just before its complete liquidation.

In 1966, she earned a Ph.D. in American literature from Warsaw University. Shortly thereafter, she moved to the USA, worked at the Radcliffe Institute, and then as a professor of writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, she established herself as a co-founder of the 'Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies'.

Most of her works are often interwoven with autobiographical elements. Among her most famous are 'Kindergarten' (1968), 'Rosa Luxemburg: A Life' (1987), and the controversial 'Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger' (1994), which deals with the romantic love between a Jewish philosophy student and her Nazi-minded teacher.

Ettinger died in the USA in 2005.