Henryka Łazowertówna wrote one of the most enduring poems to emerge from the Warsaw Ghetto, about the children who slipped through walls, holes and guards to bring food home to their starving families.

She died at Treblinka without ever knowing what became of them.

She died at Treblinka without ever knowing what became of them.

I know what became of one.

In August 1941, Łazowertówna recited Mały szmugler, The Little Smuggler, a poem spoken in the voice of a starving child who risks his life to carry food through the Warsaw Ghetto wall.

A year later, she was dead.

One of those children was still alive.

She was six years old that August. She was small, blonde and fast.

She was born at 18 Miła Street.

I called her Edna for thirty-seven years.

Henryka Wanda Łazowertówna was born in Warsaw on June 19, 1909, to Maksymilian Łazowert and Bluma Jeleńska.

She was a Polish Jewish poet who wrote in Polish and had established herself as a serious writer years before the Germans invaded her country.

“Poet murdered in the Holocaust” can flatten a person into the manner of her death. Henryka had a life before she became a victim.

Her first collection, Zamknięty pokój, The Closed Room, appeared in 1930. A second, Imiona świata, followed in 1934. She received recognition from Polish literary circles and spent time studying in Grenoble.

Then Germany invaded Poland.

On November 16, 1940, the Warsaw Ghetto was sealed. Henryka and her mother were trapped inside with hundreds of thousands of other Jews.

Henryka went to work.

Not only as a poet, but as a relief worker.

She worked with CENTOS, which aided Jewish children, and with the Jewish Social Self-Help. Emanuel Ringelblum recruited her into the clandestine Oneg Shabbat archive, the extraordinary underground effort to record Jewish life under German occupation.

For the archive, Henryka wrote portraits of individual refugee families.

She took people who were disappearing into........

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