Polish · 1892–1942
Schulz spent nearly his whole life in Drohobycz, a Galician oil town, teaching drawing and handicrafts at the state gymnasium, a job he disliked and could not afford to leave. He drew obsessively — small, disturbing images of men grovelling before women's feet — and wrote letters, and it was the novelist Zofia Nałkowska who read one of those letters, recognised what he was, and got his first book printed in 1934. Two thin volumes of stories were all he published. He translated Kafka's The Trial into Polish, or lent his name to his fiancée's translation, and corresponded with Witkacy and Gombrowicz. In 1941 the Germans took Drohobycz; a Gestapo officer named Felix Landau kept Schulz alive as a useful Jew to paint murals in his son's nursery. On 19 November 1942 a rival SS man shot him in the street, reportedly saying: you killed my Jew, I killed yours.