Ida Fink was born January 11, 1921, in Zbaraz, Poland, now part of Ukraine. She attended the High School of Music in Lwow, Poland, from 1938-41 but was forced to live in hiding through much of World War II. She emmigrated to Israel in 1957 and began her work at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial and museum, recording the memories and experiences of other Jewish survivors. Fink worked as a librarian from 1972-82.
Fink delayed her writing for more than 10 years after the Holocaust in order to achieve the emotional distance that would allow her to write in the proper voice. She recounts the genocide of her people in A Scrap of Time and Other Stories (1987), a semiautobiographical collection consisting of 22 stories and a short play first published in Hebrew translation as Pisat zman, Massada (1975). Other titles include Stot, a one-act play that was produced for Israeli radio in 1970 and German television in Germany in 1981; Slady, a radio play, in 1986; and Podroz, a novel, in 1990. She received the Anne Frank Prize for Literature in 1985, and Prix Litteraire Wizo, 1990, both for A Scrap of Time.
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