Matylda Engelman (1914–2000)

Matylda Engelman was born to a Jewish family in Bielsko, Poland. She was educated in Warsaw and completed medical cosmetician's courses in Warsaw and Paris.

In 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in World War II, Mrs. Broner, as she was known then, was alone with her baby daughter Gila. Her husband Marek Broner had left just two weeks previously for the British Mandate of Palestine to set up a new home for his family. Matylda spent the war years on the run, always in fear of being caught by the Nazis. She managed to hide her true identity by using false papers that described her as Catholic and Polish.

She worked at vineyard in Austria for some time until the arrival of the Red Army in spring 1945. At the end of the war, she learned that Marek, not having heard from her for six years, believed Matylda and Gila were dead. He had remarried and started a new family. This was a bitter blow to Matylda as the thought of joining her husband in Palestine had helped keep her alive and inspire her to save herself and her daughter. She obtained a divorce in Poland and moved in 1948 to Australia. There she and her daughter were reunited with cousins who had also survived the war and arrived some time earlier. It was not until 1965 that she went to the Council of Adult Education to learn English and then attended classes in creative writing. She won first prize for a short story in a competition offered by the Society of Women Writers. During the 1970s, Matylda was finally able to fulfill the promise she had made to herself in 1942, which was to write down what she had experienced during the war. The result was two volumes of autobiography, Journey Without End (1977) and The End of the Journey (1978).