A French translation of the book All My Mothers by Renata Piętkowska has been published. The publication of the book in a joint translation by Maria Lysinski and François Michel was supported by the Book Institute under the ©POLAND Translation Programme.

In French translation, the title of the book is ‘Toutes mes mamans’. It was published by the French publishing house Flammarion.

As Renata Piętkowska wrote, ‘All my Mums’ is a book that is part of a series of books telling children about the war. The little boy, the protagonist of this story, takes us by the hand and leads us behind the barbed wires of the Warsaw Ghetto.

The author shows us the war through the eyes of a child. The book features Irena Sendler, who saved two and a half thousand children from extermination.

Elżbieta Ficowska (born in 1942 in the Warsaw Ghetto and, on the initiative of Irena Sendler, transported as an infant in a wooden box out of the ghetto, to the Aryan side, a graduate of the Faculty of Psychology and Pedagogy at the University of Warsaw, chairperson of the Association of Children of the Holocaust in 2002-2006) said that ‘All My Mums’ is the story of a Jewish boy and about the cruel, evil world in which he had to live during the Holocaust. Szymek also met good people who saved him, tried to soothe his fear, despair and horror. “Good people are light in times of contempt”, adds Ficowska.

The author of All My Mums Renata Piątkowska is one of the best-known contemporary authors of children’s books. She has written such books as “Which is Malala?”, “Kids who are not there”, “Ebony heart”, “Stories from the sandbox” or “There is a way for everything”.

The Polish version of All My Mums was illustrated by Maciej Szymanowicz. The French translation was published with illustrations by Pauline Duhamel.

Adrian Andrzejewski