Manfred Winkler

Manfred Winkler was born in 1922 in Putyla

Manfred Winkler was born in 1922 in Putyla, a village in northern Bukovina that then belonged to Romania. He grew up in a well-off Jewish family that spoke German at home. His father was a lawyer, and his mother came from a family from Brody in Galicia.

In 1936 his parents sent him to relatives in Czernowitz to attend a Romanian high school. In 1940 Soviet authorities arrested his parents and his brother, and none of them survived. He finished school in 1941 and was then deported as a Jew to Transnistria, returning to Czernowitz in 1944.

After 1946 he lived in Timișoara, where he joined the Zionist youth movement Habonim Dror and worked in a metal factory. There he met his future wife, Hermine Levin. He wrote poems in German and joined the German section of the Romanian Writers' Union.

In 1956 he published his first German poetry collection and met the writer Hans Bergel. The two renewed their friendship in 1994 and published their letters in 2011. His last book appeared in Germany in 2014, the year he died in Tzur Hadassah.