Andrzej Vincenz

At the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, his friends Konstanty Jeleński, Jan Białostocki and his young assistant Alek Pohl died. In 1991, his beloved mother Irena Vincenz died, and in 1994 his wife Sylvia, who was almost twenty years younger than him, died after a serious illness. In the last ten years of his life, he began a relationship with the Slavicist and publicist Joanna Skibińska (born in 1967), and married for the third time.

In 1988 – to honour the 100th birthday of his late father Stanisław Vincenz – he initiated a scientific conference on the author’s work that was unprecedented in its scope. It was held in La Combe de Lancey and at the universities in Wroclaw, Lublin (Lublin Catholic University, KUL) and Budapest. In later years, he participated in symposia devoted to the work of Stanisław Vincenz and organised by the KUL – both in Lublin and in Kryvorivnya in the Ukraine.

In 1991, he donated the manuscripts of Stanisław Vincenz to Ossoliński National Library in Wroclaw.

For Andrzej Vincenz, who had had to flee Poland to escape the Russians in 1940 and had had to live his later life in exile, the issues of Poles were his first priority. The milestones in his life led him from Poland via England and France to Germany. But wherever he was, he preserved the memory of his homeland and of the land of his childhood – the Hutsul Republic.

Andrzej Vincenz died in Heidelberg on 16 August 2014. He was buried in the Salwator cemetery in Kraków next to his parents’ grave.

Joanna de Vincenz, March 2018

Link to the dictionary: : http://diglib.bis.uni-oldenburg.de/bis-verlag/wdlp/

Link to the archive of the “Kultura” magazine: : http://kulturaparyska.com/pl/ludzie/pokaz/a/andrzej_vincenz?q=Andrzej