„As a twelve-year-old girl, Janina Hescheles writes down this account in hiding within a few days. She tells of the beginnings of the German occupation in Lviv, the loss of her parents, the ghetto and the work and mass murder in the notorious forced labour camp Lemberg-Janowska. She was liberated from there in autumn 1943 shortly before the camp was dissolved. Today she lives in Israel. Janina, who has been called a Polish Anne Frank, has given the world a touching and important testimonyme.“ (Blurb to the German edition published by Markus Roth in 2019).

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Emigrated to Israel in 1950, Janina Hescheles studied chemistry in Haifa, later with a scholarship at Imperial College in London, and received her doctorate in 1962. As a scientist, she worked at the Technion in Haifa and the Weizmann Institute in Rechovor, Israel, as well as at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. She published a series of natural science essays.

Again and again, she dealt with National Socialism, the relationship of German academics to National Socialism, the Holocaust and the resistance. Inspired by her three-year research stay in Munich, she published an extensive study on the White Rose resistance group in 2007. Janina Altman, née Hescheles, is characterised by a great empathy with the oppressed and a deep striving for justice. In Israel, she has been deeply committed to the women’s movement and the peace movement for decades.


Short biography Janina Hescheles
Hescheles: Weyssenhof street (Poem, 1943)

Sources:
Janina Hescheles: Oczyma dwunastoletniej dziewczyny. Centralny Komitet Żydów Polskich, Kraków 1946
Janina Hescheles: Oczyma dwunastoletniej dziewczyny. Reedycja: Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna, 2015
Janina Hescheles: My Lvov. A Holocaust Memoir of a twelve-year-old girl. Amsterdam 2020
Janina Hescheles: Mit den Augen eines zwölfjährigen Mädchens. Hrsg. Markus Roth. Berlin 2019
Janina Hescheles: A travers les yeux d’une fille de douze ans. Paris 2016
Яніна Гешелес: Очима 12-річної дівчинки. Київ 2011
Janina Hescheles-Altman: Con los ojos de una niña de doce años. 2014
Janina Altman: ha- Ṿered ha-lavan : sṭudenṭim ṿe-anshe ruaḥ be-Germanyah li-fene ṿe-aḥare ʿaliyato shel Hiṭler le-shilṭon [The White Rose. Students and Intellectuals in Germany before and after Hitler’s rise to power. Die Weiße Rose. Studenten und Intellektuelle in Deutschland vor und nach Hitlers Machtübernahme]. Mit deutscher und englischer Einleitung. Haifa 2007

Photo:
Orrling, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30265375