Anka Grupinska

Anka Grupińska, née Anna Dorota Jakubowska in Koszalin, Poland, is a journalist, writer, and dissident. She graduated from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, where she studied English literature. From 1981 to 1982, she taught English in a high school in Poznań, then became a lecturer in English at a library in Krotoszyn. In 1980, she joined the trade union Solidarity. She became involved in dissident writing and co-founded the underground periodical Czas Kultury. She spent 1988-1989 in Israel compiling reminiscences of Holocaust survivors. During the years 1991-1993, she worked as a cultural attaché at the Polish Embassy in Tel Aviv. For many years, she has been recording interviews with eyewitnesses to the history of Jews in Poland and writing about them.
Her books include The Warsaw Ghetto = Getto Warszawskie (English and Polish edition, 2002); A Reading of the Scroll (2003), a biographical dictionary of the members of the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB) or Jewish Fighting Organization; and In the Circle: Conversations with Jewish Fighters (1993). In 2008, she was awarded the Order of Polonia Restituta (Order of Polish Rebirth) by President Lech Kaczyński but refused it.