On October 14, 1943, the poet Wisława Szymborska was twenty years old and living in Kraków, occupied by Nazi Germany. She was working as a railway employee — a job that provided the German-issued Kennkarte (identification card) that protected her from deportation to forced labor. She was reading, and beginning to write.

A different Polish woman provides the sharper historical case. Zofia Kossak-Szczucka was a novelist and Catholic activist who co-founded Żegota — the Council to Aid Jews — in 1942, the only government-sponsored resistance organization in occupied Europe dedicated to rescuing Jews. She wrote the protest pamphlet "Protest!" in 1942, which circulated clandestinely through occupied Poland and called on Poles to resist the extermination of Jews on moral grounds, making the argument to a Catholic audience that had complex relationships with both nationalism and antisemitism. She was arrested by the Gestapo in September 1942, sent to Auschwitz, and survived. She was released in 1943.

She received the Yad Vashem "Righteous Among the Nations" designation posthumously. For much of the postwar period in Poland, her name was suppressed because of her Catholic politics during the communist era.

Szymborska, who lived until 2012, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996 for poetry that navigated the full weight of the twentieth century — the war, the occupation, communism, and the specific condition of being a woman in a century that had tried to kill her country twice.