Adolf Rudnicki (1912–1990)

Adolf Rudnicki was born Aron Hirschhorn to a Jewish family in Żabno, Poland. His father Itshe Hirschhorn was a rabbi. After attending a trade school, he worked as a bank clerk. He began his literary career in 1930 with the publication of his short novel "Death of the Operator" in the current events journal Kurier Poranny. He gained popularity in Poland with his novels Rats (1932), Solders (1933), The Unloved (1937) and Summer (1938).

Mobilized by the Polish Army in 1939 at the start of World War II, he fought in the September campaign and was taken prisoner by the Germans, but managed to escape. He went to Lwów (present-day Lviv, Ukraine) in the Soviet-occupied zone of Poland and wrote for a Communist periodical. When the Nazis occupied Lwów in 1941, he returned to Warsaw under a false identity and was active in the Resistance movement. He joined the Polish Home Army in 1944 and took part in the Warsaw Uprising. After the war, he lived for a few years in Łódź and was the editor of the journal Kuźnica. He published a cycle of short stories and novels, including Żywe i martwe morze (The Dead and the Living Sea, 1952), Flight from Jasna Polana (1949), The Golden Windows (1963), and The Merchant of Łódź (1963) focused on Jewish suffering and resistance. They were collectively known as The Epoch of the Ovens, a term that entered the Polish vocabulary as a metaphorical name for the Holocaust. After 1953, Rudnicki began publishing weekly essays on a wide range of topics, which were later collected in a series of volumes called The Blue Pages (1956-1958). After the anti-Semitic campaign of the Communist government in Poland in 1968, he moved to Paris, where he married and had a son. He returned to Poland in the 1980s and lived in Warsaw until his death.

He also wrote memoirs and an autobiographical volume, Krakowskie Przedmieście, Full of Desserts (1986).