Leopold Tyrmand

Leopold Tyrmand
Plaque in memory of Leopold Tyrmand at 6 Konopnickiej Street in Warsaw, where he lived in 1946–1955
Born	(1920-05-16)May 16, 1920, Warsaw, Poland
Died	March 19, 1985(1985-03-19), Fort Myers, Florida, United States
Language	Polish

Leopold Tyrmand (May 16, 1920 in Warsaw, Poland – March 19, 1985) was a popular Polish-Jewish novelist, writer and editor. Tyrmand emigrated from Poland to the United States in 1966, and five years later married an American, Mary Ellen Fox. He served as editor of an anti-communist monthly Chronicles of Culture with John A. Howard. Tyrmand died of a heart attack at the age of 64 years in Florida.

Leopold Tyrmand was born in an assimilated Jewish family. His paternal grandfather, Zelman Tyrmand, was a member of the Management Board of Warsaw's Nożyk Synagogue. His father, Mieczyslaw Tyrmand, had a wholesale leather business. Tyrmand's mother was Maria Oliwenstein. His parents during the war were sent to the Majdanek Concentration Camp, where his father was murdered. His mother survived the war and emigrated to Israel.

In 1938 he graduated from the Warsaw Gymnasium. He went to Paris, where he studied for a year at the faculty of architecture at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, the Academy of Fine Arts. There he met for the first time Western European culture and American jazz. Both of these fascinations left a lasting mark on his work.

During the war Tyrmand was a resistance fighter in Poland. In spring 1941 he was arrested by the NKVD secret police in Wilno and sentenced to 8 years in prison. He got out from a bombed-out transport after the Nazi German attack on the Soviet positions in Operation Barbarossa. To escape the Holocaust, he traveled on false papers to Germany. He worked as a waiter while in Germany; an experience he wrote about in his semi-autobiographical novel "Filip". He tried to escape to neutral Sweden and was caught and imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp Grini in Norway. Before he returned to a devastated Poland, he worked with the Norwegian Red Cross.

In 1954, he wrote a diary, which he later edited and released in 1980 as "Dziennik 1954"; it has been translated into English and was published in 2014 as Diary 1954. The book, which gives a unique description of the daily life in Stalinist Poland, is now considered to be one of his greatest achievements.