Career
From 1942 to 1944 Alicia Nitecki lived in Nazi-occupied Warsaw with her upper-middle-class family. After the crush of the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944 she and her family were deported by the Nazis to the west of Germany and finally lived in a labor camp in Lauterbach, Baden-Württemberg until 1945. After the war they were taken to a Polish displaced persons" camp in the Canton of Louisiana Courtine, France near Nantes and finally to Carqueiranne in southern France, where Alicia Nitecki went to a French elementary school until 1947.
In April 1948 the family came to England and frequently changed residences, which meant for Alicia frequent changes of educational institutions.
After graduation from Sheffield, Alicia Nitecki took a secretarial course at the City of London College, and worked as secretary and, additionally, as baby-sitter, in which capacity she was employed by the family of the American literary scholar Richard Ellman. Ellman suggested that she should do graduate work in English in America and wrote her a recommendation.
She was accepted at the State University of New York in Buffalo in 1966. She got her Master of Arts in English Literature from Buffalo, and then went on to a Doctor of Philosophy program at Kent State University in Ohio where she wrote her doctoral thesis in 1976.
Since 1980 she has been professor of English Literature at Bentley.
Her interest in holocaust literature focussed on Tadeusz Borowski and other Polish writers who had survived the holocaust. In 2000 she translated Borowski"s We were in Auschwitz and in 2002 Henryk Grynberg"s Drohobycz. Other translations include:
Halina Nelken: And Yet, I Am Here, translations
Nelken, Nitecki, University of Massachusetts Press, 1999 (Paperback 2001)
Tadeusz Drewnowski: Postal Indiscretions: The Correspondence of Tadeusz Borowski, translations
A. Nitecki Northwestern University Press, 2007
Mieczyslaw Lurczynski: The Old Guard, translations A. Nitecki State University of New York Press, forthcoming 2009.
Nitecki has also published numerous essays in American and German periodicals and given lectures and presentations on both her scholarly interests, mediaeval English literature and the Holocaust, as reflected in Polish writings.