 Arrested together with her father by the Gestapo in January 1941, she was imprisoned and spent the rest of the war in concentration camps at Ravensbrück and Neu-Rohlau, near Karlsbad, where she worked in a porcelain factory.After the liberation of the camp by the US Army, she resumed her secondary studies in Italy, where she graduated in 1946 from the high school established in Porto San Giorgio by the Polish Army's IInd Corpus.She then studied romance philology in Paris, where she met her husband, , director of the bookstore and publishing company Libella, on the Ile Saint Louis, from 1946 to 1993.