Ida Fink (Hebrew: אידה פינק‎‎, 1 November 1921 – 27 September 2011) was a Polish-Israeli author who wrote about the Holocaust in Polish.

Biography

Ida Fink was born as Ida Landau in Zbaraż, Poland (now Zbarazh, Ukraine) on 1 November 1921 to a Polish-Jewish family.

Her father, Ludwig Landau, was a physician and her mother, Fannie Landau, worked as a teacher in a local school. She was a student of music at the Lwów Conservatory, but her studies were halted by the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Landau and her family spent 1941-1942 in the Zbaraż ghetto, before escaping, along with her sister, with the help of Aryan papers. During those two years her mother also died of cancer. After the Holocaust, Landau married Bruno Fink and had a daughter, Miri Fink. In 1957, Fink and her family immigrated to Israel. They settled in Holon, where she worked as a music librarian and an interviewer for Yad Vashem. She published her first story in 1971, and went on to receive numerous awards for her writing.[1]

Literary career

Fink wrote in Polish, primarily on Holocaust themes. Her stories revolve around the terrible choices that the Jews had to make during the Nazi era and the hardships of Holocaust survivors after the war.

Films

A documentary about Ida Fink, The Garden that Floated Away, was produced by Israeli filmmaker Ruth Walk.

The 2008 film Spring 1941, directed by Uri Barbash, was based on her work.

Awards

In 2008, Fink was awarded the Israel Prize, for literature.

She has also won the Anne Frank Prize, the Buchman Prize and the Sapir Prize.

Published work

• The Key Game (1986)
• A Scrap of Time and Other Stories (1987)
• The Journey (1990)
• Traces (1996)