The Year I Didn’t Die – A Meeting with Mikołaj Grynberg

"The Year I Didn’t Die" is a deeply personal and moving account of the author’s experience of surviving a heart attack. The prose blends memoir, reportage, and profound existential reflection.

Notes from an Unexpected End and Return

Mikołaj has written a book about life. Because when you write about dying, you are ultimately writing about life. There is a great love of life in this book, along with a considerable fear of death. It even touches on a mathematical formula for the time one has left to live. And if death appears in the book at all, it is only the death of others—recently, like parents or grandparents, or long ago, those killed in the Holocaust. It is a moving book, somewhat sad, yet at times humorous. A must-read, writes Andrzej Leder.

Mikołaj Grynberg – writer and photographer, trained as a psychologist. He is the author of the photo albums Dużo kobiet (2009) and Auschwitz – What Am I Doing Here? (2010), with his photographs exhibited around the world. He has published collections of interviews: Survivors of the 20th Century (2012), I Accuse Auschwitz. Family Stories (2014), and The Book of Departure (2018), as well as two volumes of short stories: Rejwach (2017), which was nominated for the Nike Literary Award and the Angelus Central European Literary Award, and its U.S. edition, translated by Sean Gasper Bye, was a finalist for the 2022 National Jewish Book Awards and is nominated for The Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature; and Confidential (2020). In 2021, he debuted as a filmmaker with the documentary Proof of Identity, produced by the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. For years, he has explored the history and experiences of Polish Jews in the 20th century, asking himself and his interviewees what it means to be Jewish in Poland. He also conducts workshops on writing personal histories.

This event was organized thanks to funding from the City of Poznań budget. #poznanwspiera

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