Jerzy Szperkowicz is dead. The information was confirmed by his wife Hanna Krall

Jerzy Szperkowicz died on the night of February 19-20.

Jerzy Szperkowicz is dead. Szczygieł: “I’ll be back before night. Report on the silent” deserves Nike

“Last year, he completed a long-term journalistic mission – looking for traces of his parents, which resulted in the outstanding book ‘I’ll be back before night. Report on the silent’ Znak Publishing House. A few days ago with Julianna Jonek-Springer, Nogaś on the website and Szot’s sentence, we talked about what the title, published last year, certainly deserves the Nike award – and we all chose this book, writes Mariusz Szczygie³ on Facebook, saying goodbye to Szperkowicz.

Szperkowicz was born on August 22, 1933 in Vilnius. In 1956 he graduated in journalism from the University of Warsaw. He started working as a journalist with “Dziennik Białostocki”, later he was a correspondent for “Życie Warszawy” from Moscow. In the latter editorial office he met his future wife, Hanna Krall.

He also worked in the editorial offices of “Życie i Nowoczesność” (1971-1973), “Kultura” (1974-1977), “Przegląd Techniczny” (1977-1981), “Firma” (1982-1984), “Horizons of Technology” and “Odra” “(1984–1989), he was also one of those who co-created” Gazeta Wyborcza “from the very beginning, with which he was associated until 1994.

He was the author of the play “Stara Spraw”, the author of a collection of columns “Polish Solitaire” (1980), the novel “Wyspaoru” (1990), and the unpublished “Polish Pacierz”. He translated from the French “How to Learn Skiing Yourself” by Georges Joubert (1976).

Szperkowicz’s most personal book

“I’ll be back before night. Report on the silent” appeared last year. In the description of the book we read: “The reporter returns to discover the truth about the fate of the lost mother. October dawn, 1943. The house is still asleep. Mum, already dressed, feeds three-month-old Irene. In a moment she leaves, eighteen kilometers in front of her. hiding a friend in a neighboring village. He will arrange it quickly, he will come back before night. He does not tell his husband about his trip, he would not let her go. More than fifty years after the war, an adult son returns to Belarus, to his childhood land. the missing mother he had last seen on that October morning.

There are stories that determine the whole of life and that you want to forget all your life, but they ask to be told. Jerzy Szperkowicz, a journalist and reporter, breaks into his own memory and the memory of witnesses of those events in his report, which he prepares for many years, in order to reveal a terrible secret and understand the relations between neighbors from one village. The truth he discovers turns out to be worse than all assumptions. “