Józef Wittlin

Józef Wittlin (1896–1976) was born on the Dmytrow estate in Galician Podolia and from 1904 grew up in Lviv, where he worked as a teacher after the First World War. Starting in 1922, he worked in Łódź as a theatre director, writer, theatre critic and literary scholar. His famous novel Sól ziemi (The Salt of the Earth) was published in 1935. As a Jew and an anti-war activist, Wittlin fled the Nazi occupation in 1939, moving first to France and then in 1941 to the US. He wrote his elegiac epitaph of the city, Mój Lwów (City of Lions), in 1946 in New York, where he lived until his death in 1976.