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ZENIA LARSSON SWEDEN
STOCKHOLM

DRZEWKO NR 637
TREE NO.
Zenia Larsson was born in Łódź on 2 April 1922 as Zenia Szejna Marcinkowska.
Her father, Mojżesz Marcinkowski, was a hairdresser and had a salon in
the southern part of Łódź, at today’s 5, Reymonta Square. It is said that he
spoke excellent Polish, and Yiddish with a strong Lithuanian accent. He was a
hairdresser and a poet. His beautiful wife, Perła Wołek, whose beauty was
admired by everyone around, had beautiful long hair and a pale complexion,
but she was sickly and died young. Zenia was a lonely child, especially when
her father’s new wife, Ewa Klaczewska, appeared at home. Zenia lived in her
own world, often ran to nearby fields, loved flowers, animals, wrote poems
and wanted to be a writer.
In her childhood, Zenia became friends with Chava Rosenfarb, their fathers
were activists of the socialist party Bund and lived very close for some time.
The girls did not go to the same school: Zenia studied at a public school, then
at the middle school of Józef Lajb Ab. They both liked books. They spent a lot
of time together. Chava and she discussed characters from the novel that was
being prepared, about the position of women in the world, about social injus-
tice. During the war, they both went to the ghetto and they passed secondary
school leaving exams together. Zenia then got a job in food provisioning and
distribution, but she did not manage to save her loved ones. First, she lost her
grandmother and aunt with her three children, and in the spring of 1943, her
father died. She was left with her stepmother and they grew closer together.
At that time, she began to carve small figurines in clay. In August 1944, Zenia
and Ewa came to the place where the Rosenfarbs were hiding – all of them
were deported from Radegast station to Auschwitz on 23 August.
Zenia and her stepmother went through exactly the same as Chava Rosenfarb,
her sister and mother. They kept together all the time, slept on the same
bunks, shared bread. First, they were in the Sasel camp near Hamburg, then
in Bergen-Belsen. When the British liberated the camp on 15 April 1945, they
all suffered from typhus. Ewa died the day after the liberation. After conva-
lescence, Zenia decided not to return to Poland, she did not have anybody
there anymore. She got help from the Swedish Red Cross and in July 1945,
she left for Sweden.
In Stockholm, she began studies at the sculpture department of the Royal
Academy of Fine Arts. She sculpted in stone, wood and metal, she had many
solo and group exhibitions. In 1950, she married an engineer Per-Axel Larsson
(1919-1994). She made her debut as a writer in 1960, publishing in Swedish the
novel Skuggorna vid träbron (The Shadows at the Wooden Bridge) about the
Łódź ghetto. This is an autobiographical book inspired by the author’s wartime
Życiu na spotkanie, Zenia Larsson, 1962
Livet till motes, Zenia Larsson, 1962 experiences. After that, she wrote subsequent volumes: Lang ar gryningen

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