Ida Fink

Ida Fink (; 1 November 1921 – 27 September 2011) was a Polish-born Israeli author who wrote about the Holocaust in Polish. Winner of the Israel Prize for Fiction in 2008.

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, and from the age of 16, she had made up her mind to become a writer, 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. and until the end of the war, she fled from one refuge to another, working on German farms. During those two years her mother also died of cancer. She wrote about her experiences during the escape with her sister, using Aryan documents, in her book: "We Walk at Night, We Sleep in the Daylights" (1993). After the Holocaust, Landau married Bruno Fink, an engineer, 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, collecting testimonies. In 1958, she began publishing short stories in Polish-language press. In her final years, she resided in Ramat Aviv, a neighbourhood of Tel Aviv.

Literary career Although Fink was an Israeli writer, her books were originally written in her childhood language: Polish, and were later translated into Hebrew. Her books deal with the life and trauma of the Holocaust, which she experienced in her youth, and the hardships of Holocaust survivors after the war.

Fink began writing in Poland after the end of the war, and continued her work after immigrating to Israel. She focused on episodes in the fate of individuals, their personal relationships, and their daily struggle for survival and their hardships during the Holocaust. According to her, she had the impression, after immigrating to Israel, that there was little interest in the subject and that there was a lack of information and background. It was only with the Eichmann trial that the Israeli audience was exposed to the direct stories of Holocaust refugees. Until then, the subject had been too abstract in their minds.

Fink's goal was not to document history, but to immortalize the individual, the personal story of the little people, who were not meant to be heroes. That is why she did not often mention the names of places in her stories. She was wary of generalizations and moral judgments of her heroes from any side and lets the situations and conversations tell their own story.

The film (2002) was based on her book The Journey.

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

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

She has also won the Anne Frank Prize (1985), 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)