Zofia Romanowicz

Zofia Romanowiczowa, Jours, France, August 1987

Zofia and Kazimierz Romanowicz in Paris, September 1998

Zofia Romanowiczowa (born Zofia Górska; 18 October 1922 – 28 March 2010) was a Polish writer and translator.

When World War II broke out, she first stayed in Radom, where she participated in the Polish resistance (Zwiazek Walki Zbrojnej) as a liaison officer. Arrested together with her father by the Gestapo in January 1941, she was imprisoned and spent the rest of the war in concentration camps at Ravensbrück and Neu-Rohlau, near Karlsbad, where she worked in a porcelain factory. After the liberation of the camp by the US Army, she resumed her secondary studies in Italy, where she graduated in 1946 from the high school established in Porto San Giorgio by the Polish Army's IInd Corpus.

She then studied romance philology in Paris, where she met her husband, Kazimierz Romanowicz, director of the bookstore and publishing company Libella, on the Ile Saint Louis, from 1946 to 1993. Together they founded Galerie Lambert in 1959, one of the most important centers of Polish culture abroad after World War II. She received the Kościelski Award in 1964. In 1976 she signed the Letter of 59.

In addition to poems written while in concentration camp, her literary contributions include twelve novels, a collection of translations of Troubadour poems into Polish, and numerous short stories and articles which she published over the years in the journals Wiadomosci (London), Kultura (Paris), and in Poland in "Tygodnik Powszechny", "Nowa Kultura", and "Odra". She wrote in Polish. Three of her novels were translated into French: Przejscie przez Morze Czerwone" (1960, in French: "Le Passage de la Mer Rouge"), was also translated into English ("Passage through the Red Sea"), German and Hebrew; "Lagodne oko blekitu" (1968 in French: "Le Chandail Bleu") and "Na Wyspie (1984, in french: "Ile Saint Louis").

She belonged to the Union of Polish Writers in Exile, and, since 1989, to the Union of Polish Writers. The archives of her work can be found in the Emigration Archive of the University of Torun Library.

She died in Lailly en Val, near Orleans (France) in 2010, aged 87.