Ginczanka left Warsaw in June 1939 to spend her summer vacations (as was her habit every year) with her grandmother in Równe Wołyńskie. Here she was caught by the outbreak of the Second World War occasioned by the Invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany on Friday, 1 September 1939, and in reaction to this news decided to stay at Równe, a town which, being located on the Eastern Borderlands of Poland, was relatively sheltered from the hostilities of war. This circumstance changed dramatically just two weeks later with the Soviet Union's attack on Poland from the East on 17 September, which brought Soviet rule to Równe (a town never to be returned to Poland again), and with it communist harassment and attacks targeting the "bourgeois elements" and the propertied classes in particular. The grandmother Klara Sandberg's ground-floor business (pharmacy store) in the town's main street was immediately expropriated, while their second-story living quarters were in large measure requisitioned for Soviet officials, squeezing the owners (including Ginczanka) into a single servant's room. These developments forced upon Ginczanka the decision to leave Równe to try to find accommodation in the much larger Polish city of Lvov, situated 213 kilometres to the south-east and likewise occupied by the Soviet Union. Before departure, the grandmother packed all the family heirlooms and valuables like table silver into her luggage, both as a means of preserving her ownership of the movable property and to provide for Ginczanka's future dowry. In Lvov Ginczanka rented a flat in the apartment building in the ulica Jabłonowskich № 8a (pictured to the right), where her co-residents included Karol Kuryluk, and the writers Władysław Bieńkowski (19061991), Marian Eile (19101984), and Franciszek Gil (19171960).