She spent the first years of the war in Lviv, where she got a job as an accountant and married Michał Weinzieher, an art critic. She had to hide her origins, which was not easy because of her great – and typically Semitic – beauty. Ginczanka, as a hiding Jewish woman, was reported by a woman named Chominowa, the housekeeper of the tenement where the poet lived. Despite this, she managed to escape the police, and the event itself – and numerous other incidents of denunciations – Ginczanka commemorated in the overflowing bitterness of the poem Non Omnis Moriar, one of the most poignant testimonies of the suffering of the Jews in Polish literature. In 1942 she and her husband found shelter in Kraków. In the autumn or winter of 1944 the Gestapo arrested Ginczanka. She was shot in the courtyard of the prison at Montelupich, just weeks before the Red Army entered Poland.
Ginczanka’s early poems – sensual, praising life and often referring to women's biology and physiology – grow out of rebellion against her bourgeois upbringing. Sensualism, however, represents a poet’s path to getting to know the reality and an expression of faith in the fact that the poetic word can be the equivalent of reality.
From the beginning of her creative career, Ginczanka also described the world by referring to myths and traditions of culture: the myth of the Far East (the early cycle of Chinese Fairy Tales of La-lita – a geisha made of clay and turned into a real person by a loving man), Old German mythology (Siegfried’s poem) to themes from the Mediterranean (e.g., centaurs) and Jewish cultures (poems Poznań, whose characters are Adam and Eve, references to the Song of Songs). In later poems, the sensual experience of reality would give way to getting to know the world through culture.
