Marcel Reich-Ranicki

A biography of a Polish Jew, born in 1920 in Włocławek, whose family lived in Berlin from 1929. In 1938 Reich-Ranicki was banished from Germany to Poland, where he joined his parents and brother, who were already living in Warsaw. After the German occupation in 1939 and the establishment of the ghetto in Warsaw, Reich-Ranicki was employed by the Judenrat to work on the Jewish census. On 22 July 1942 Reich-Ranicki dictated to a co-worker the Polish translation of the death sentence on Warsaw Jewry by the SS, after which the head of the Judenrat, Czerniakow, committed suicide. Between July-September 1942 most of Warsaw's Jews, including Reich-Ranicki's parents and his wife's mother, were deported to Treblinka and killed. In fall 1942, 60,000 Jews remained in the ghetto. In January 1943 Reich-Ranicki and his wife managed to escape and were hidden by a Pole until the liberation. After the war they remained in Poland, where Reich-Ranicki became a famous literary critic. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)