Igor Newerly

Igor Newerly (1903 to 1987) was a Polish novelist and educator. Born in Białowieża into a mixed Czech and Russian family, he studied law at Kiev University but was removed for political reasons, and in 1924 he emigrated illegally to the newly independent Poland, where he worked in the field of pedagogy in Warsaw. He worked together with the renowned educator Janusz Korczak, becoming his secretary in 1926, and under the German occupation he helped Korczak at his orphanage and saved his diary. A member of the Polish resistance, he hid Jewish colleagues, was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and survived the camps at Majdanek, Auschwitz, Oranienburg and Bergen-Belsen. After the war he resumed his pedagogical career and also wrote novels, among them A Souvenir from the Cellulose Mill.