Kraków of Miriam Akavia

Miriam Akavia (Matylda Weinfeld; born in 1927, died in 2015), was born in Kraków at ulica Łobzowska 47 in a family of progressive Jews. She spent her childhood in Kraków until the outbreak of World War II and years later she described it in an autobiographical novel entitled "My Vineyard". During the war she lived in Lwów, in the Kraków ghetto, in KL Plaszow, KL Auschwitz and in Bergen-Belsen, where - exhausted and on the point of dying of starvation - she was liberated. When she got back on her feet, she decided to make an aliya to Israel. She returned to Poland after many years and then started visiting Kraków regularly. She became a frequent guest of the Jewish Culture Festival and chairwoman of the Polish-Israeli Friendship Society. She was an extremely warm and good person who tried to promote understanding between nations.
Miriam Akavia's Kraków memories will be the basis of the story about her life and, more broadly, about the progressive Jews of Kraków in the interwar period.