Christian Witness, Poland - Polish - Polonia

All Souls Day in Poland – Candles at the tomb of Kornel Makuszyński

From Wikipedia: Kornel Makuszyński

Kornel Makuszyński (8 January 1884 in Stryj, currently Ukraine —” 31 July 1953 in Zakopane) was a Polish writer of children’s and youth literature.

He went to school in Lviv (Polish: Lwów), and wrote his first poems at the age of 14. These were published two years later in the newspaper Słowo Polskie, in which he soon became a theatre critic. He studied language and literature at both the University of Lviv (then Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów, Poland) and in Paris. He was evacuated to Kiev in 1915, where he ran the Polish Theatre and was the chairman of the Polish writers and journalist community.

He moved to Warsaw in 1918, and became a writer.

He was buried at the Peksowe Brzysko cemetery in Zakopane, where he lived from 1945. There is a museum dedicated to him there.

His children’s books have an enduring popularity in Poland, whatever the sharp changes in the country’s fortunes and its political system. They have been translated to many other languages. Among others, they are very popular in Israel, where Polish Jewish immigrants since the 1920s and 1930’s took care to have many of them translated to Hebrew and introduced them to their own children.