Zenia Marcinkowski was born in the Polish city of Lodz in 1922, the only child of a Jewish barber. When she was seventeen the Nazis invaded and conquered Poland. The two hundred thousand Jews of Lodz ended up in one of the largest ghettos, where many of the healthy were employed as slave laborers for the German war machine. After four years in the ghetto, during which her father died of tuberculosis, Zenia was transported with her mother to Auschwitz in August 1944. With the approach of the Red Army in March 1945, they were sent west to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen and then on to a labor camp outside Hamburg. After the liberation of the camp by the English, her mother died and Zenia was moved to Sweden by the Red Cross, the only member of her family who had survived.
In Sweden she went to art school, married Per-Axel Larsson, became a successful artist, and wrote down her memories of what had happened to her in the war. In her trilogy of novels following the wartime fate of Paula Levin, she used her own experiences to create one of the lasting accounts of the Holocaust and of how it felt to end up in Sweden. Since then she has published several other novels also dealing with the situation that Jews faced in midcentury, usually with a special interest in experiences in Sweden after the war. Her observations on the topic of identity that is so central to this anthology are not from a novel but from one of her books of essays, Mellan gårdagen och nuet (Between yesterday and today).