Wooden box with handwritten inscription in Polish: "Negatives/ VARDAGS", a stamp with the address "Ogrodowa Street, Lublin" and a sticker "Krystyna Frenkiel/ Sockengatan 34 B/ 252 77 Helsingborg".
The owner of the object was Krystyna Modrzewska (1919–2008), a scientist, anthropologist, lecturer and writer associated with Lublin.
She was brought up in the family of Hersz Mandelbaum, a famous doctor from Lublin, and Franciszka née Frenkiel from Warsaw. In 1937, she passed her secondary school final examinations and took up studies at the Natural Sciences Department of the Bologna University with Fabio Frassetto as the leading professor. While in Bologna, she was baptised and, following her beliefs, became a Catholic. Her studies were interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. Already at the beginning of the war, Krystyna decided to change her surname from Mandelbaum to Modrzewska. In February 1941, Modrzewska was sworn in and assigned to the Quartermaster Headquarters of the Home Army District Division "Gołąb" in Garwolin. She adopted a nickname "Kret” ("Mole”). As a senior rifleman, she cooperated with the Home Army until the entry of Soviet troops in July 1944. She lost most of her family during the war.
In 1944, Krystyna Modrzewska returned to Lublin with her mother. She decided to continue her interrupted studies at the newly established Maria Curie-Skłodowska University. In 1947, she defended her master's thesis, and in 1948 she obtained a doctorate in natural sciences. Parallel to her studies, she worked together with her mother as a teacher at the Primary Jewish School at 3 Wyszyńskiego Street in Lublin. In 1950, she began medical studies at the Medical University of Białystok, which she completed in 1955. She returned to Lublin and started working at the Department of Anthropology at the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, and took up a job at the County Hospital in Bełżyce.
Due to growing conflicts at the university, repression by the authorities, intrusive surveillance and deepening anti-Semitic sentiments, she decided to emigrate from Poland. On 5 June 1970, at the age of 51, she left for Sweden. In February 1980, she defended another doctoral thesis. She obtained her doctoral degree on the basis of the dissertation Epidemiological Investigations in a North Swedish Isolate with High Prevalence of Schizophrenia. The thesis was supervised by Professor Jan Arvid Böök. She obtained her habilitation at Uppsala University a year later. She retired in 1985.
In addition to her scientific career, Krystyna Modrzewska was also active in the literary field. In 1958, she took third place in a competition for doctors' diaries announced by the "Służba Zdrowia" (Health Service) weekly. This resulted in the book entitled Rok w miasteczku (A Year in a Small Town) published in 1962 under a pen name Adam Struś by the Czytelnik Publishing House. Modrzewska published several other books under the same pen name: Jestem kim innym (I'm Somebody Else), Prostokąty (Rectangles), Słowa pierwsze i ostatnie (The First and the Last Words) and Gaudeamus w cyrku cieni czyli opowiastki uniwersyteckie (Gaudeamus in the Circus of Shadows or the University Stories). After retiring, she continued her writing career. She concentrated on memoirs. In her books, she openly addressed, among other things, issues relating to gender identity. From the early 1990s, she published nine books of a memoir character. The most important is the triptych: Trzy razy Lublin (Three Times Lublin, 1991), Czas przedostatni (The Time Penultimate, 1992), Na krawędzi chaosu (On the Brink of Chaos, 1994) and Dom przy Bernardyńskiej (The House at Bernardyńska Street, 1994) – devoted to the family tenement house.
The presented objects belonging to Krystyna Modrzewska were kept by her friends Jeanette and Carl-Magnus Backman after her death. In 2012, as part of the project "To Save from Oblivion – Krystyna Modrzewska", thanks to the help of Alexandra Sikora, they were donated to the "Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre" Center in Lublin.
