Identity area
Type of entity
Authorized form of name
Parallel form(s) of name
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
- Iza Laponce
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Description area
Dates of existence
History
Iza Fiszhaut Laponce (née Gustawa Stak) was born in Poland to Dorota (Dola) Oderberg and Hilary Stak in 1938. Her family lived in the Warsaw ghetto. Her mother was shipped from Umschlagplatz to Treblinka, where she perished. Iza was smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto prior to its destruction, and survived in hiding with false papers, sheltered by the Milewicz–Rygalsgi family who were members of the underground resistance. She was adopted by the Fiszhaut family. She left Poland in 1949, coming by ship to New York, then to Vancouver by train.
Iza worked as a librarian in the Humanities and Social Science Reference Division at UBC. She complied the Canadian Politics Bibliography. Iza married Jean Laponce (1925–2016), a professor in political science at UBC; they had one daughter. Iza wrote an unpublished memoir of her childhood in Poland and an unpublished history of the Fiszhaut family. She died in Vancouver, BC, in 2019.