Irit Amiel

Irit Amiel was born Irena Librowicz to a Jewish family in Czestochowa, southern Poland. During World War II, she managed to escape the ghetto in Czestochowa and survived the Holocaust with the help of Christian Poles and false documents. Her parents and the rest of her immediate family were killed at Treblinka. In 1947, she travelled with a youth group to illegally emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine against the quotas for Jews. She lived for a while on a kibbutz and later moved to Tel Aviv. She made her literary debut in 1994 with a volume of poems called Examination of the Holocaust. Other volumes of poetry published in Polish have taken the Holocaust as the subject, including I Did Not Make It (1998) and Inhale Deeply (2002). In 2008, her volume of prose, Double Landscape, was published and nominated for the Nike Literary Award. She has also written a number of songs. She translates works from Polish to Hebrew, including works by Mark Hłaski, Henryk Grynberg, Hanna Krall, Abraham Koplowicz, and Wisława Szymborska. She has also translated poems of modern Israeli poets into Polish and published them in her own anthology.