Flexible in all systems. The many lives of Konrad Gruda

Origins and youth
 

Konrad Gruda was born Konrad Glücksmann on 25 October 1915 in Bielsko (Bielitz), which at that time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He came from a prominent Jewish family. 

His father Siegmund/Zygmunt Glücksmann (1884–1942), the son of a kosher butcher from near Wadowice, was a lawyer and a leading activist in the Jewish Social Democrat movement in Galicia, and later among the German Social Democrats in the state of Poland. After being wounded in the First World War, he founded a legal chambers in Bielsko, joined the local council and was considered a Marxist. For two legislative periods, he served as a representative in the Silesian state parliament, opposed the voivode Michał Grażyński and issued early warnings about the National Socialists[1]. He fled from Hitler, travelling with his family to Lwów (Lviv/Lemberg), which had by then been incorporated into the Soviet Union. From there, he was deported by Stalin to Siberia in the autumn of 1940. After his release following the Sikorski-Mayski agreement of 1941, he moved to Bukhara in Uzbekistan. There, he worked in the repatriation centre for Polish soldiers, where he became infected with typhus and died[2]. 

Konrad’s mother Hilda, née Rosner (1888–1972) also came from a Jewish family from Bielsko. Her father Salomon (1851–1940) was a travelling salesman. Her brother Rudolf (1887–1955) became a dermatologist in Vienna after studying medicine there. He survived the Holocaust after going into hiding in Klosterneuburg[3]. Hilda’s parents sent her to Britain for two years to study. Afterwards, she worked as a teacher and later accompanied her husband to the Soviet Union. After 1945, she taught English for several years at what was now the Polish university in Wrocław. She later moved to Sweden together with the family of her daughter Ruth, born in 1926, who was married to Jerzy Kobryński (1921–1998), and who worked occasionally as a dentist. She remained there until the end of her life. During the 1950s, Kobryński taught espionage techniques at the training centre of the Ministry for Public Security (Ministerstwo Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego) in Legionowo[4].

Konrad attended the grammar school in Bielsko, passing his higher school-leaving exams in 1933. He was an active member of the Jewish sports clubs in the town, particularly as a swimmer. Even at an early age, he went on hikes and skied in the Beskid mountains nearby. In 1930, he met Fritz Kantor (1908–1979) at an international water polo competition in Prague, where he was taking part with his club from Bielsko. Kantor was a successful player in the Hagibor Prague Jewish sports association. It emerged that Kantor had found a way of combining his two passions, sport and literature, in his line of work. He had already become one of the best-known young writers of the time under the pseudonym Friedrich Torberg. Glücksmann was keen to follow his example. He was particularly impressed by Torberg’s book “Die Mannschaft. Roman eines Sportlebens” (“The Team. A Sports Novel”), published in 1935[5].

However, at the insistence of his parents, he first studied law at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. During this period, he joined the Association of Independent Socialist Youth (Związek Niezależnej Młodzieży Socjalistycznej), remaining a member until the organisation was disbanded in 1938. It is said that due to his political activity, he was brought before a court in Kraków in 1937 and sentenced to two years in prison on parole[6]. In any case, he abandoned his studies at this point in time. In 1938/39, he took on a part-time job in the office of the Śląski Zakład Kredytowy bank in Bielsko.