Janina Altman

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Janina Altman (2006)

Janina Altman (born Hescheles , Polish Janka Heszelesówna , January 2, 1931 in Lwów , Poland ) is a Polish-Israeli chemist and Holocaust survivor .

Life

Janina Hescheles' father Henryk Hescheles was a journalist in Lviv and one of the editors of the Zionist newspaper in Polish Chwila , her mother worked in the hospital at Józef Dwernicki Street 54 as a registrar and since the outbreak of war as a nurse. The family lived with their grandparents in the Jewish quarter on Jakób-Herman-Strasse. The father's brother Marian Hemar was able to flee from Warsaw to England at the beginning of the Second World War . Lviv was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939. Henryk Hescheles was murdered in 1941 in the first days after the German conquest of Lviv. According to the investigations that Janina Altmann was able to make later, he was killed byNightingale battalion , in which the later Federal Minister Theodor Oberländer also worked as an officer, murdered. Her uncle Stanisław Lem managed to disguise his Jewish origins and survive the German occupation. Janina Hescheles and her mother initially survived the pogroms organized by the Ukrainian population of Lviv . Janina's grandparents and other relatives and friends were arrested and murdered during Jewish actions organized by the Germans . Her mother then took her own life with cyanide under the pressure of the circumstances . Janina was imprisoned in the Janowska forced labor camp and worked as a seamstress for the German equipment works . Michał Borwicz , who had organized an illegal literary life in the forced ghetto, escaped in September 1943 and ensured that Janina was also able to flee in October 1943 with the help of the Jewish resistance organization Żegota .

Hescheles was hidden by various families in Kraków and then by Jadwiga Strzałecka in an orphanage in Poronin . At the suggestion of Borwicz, three weeks after the successful escape, she began to write down her memories of the persecution in Lviv. The manuscript was printed in 1946 under the title Oczyma dwunastoletniej dziewczyny [ Through the eyes of a twelve year old] by the Organization of Polish Jews in Cracow. In contrast to Anne Frank's diary, “her report begins where it ends, namely when there is no more hiding and the child is exposed to the dangers and the terrible experiences in the camp without protection”. After the end of the war she moved to an orphanage in Sopot , where she was able to attend school again and graduated from high school in 1949.

When her report appeared in German translation in East Berlin in 1958 and then in Munich in 1963 , the editors believed she was among the victims of the Holocaust.

In 1950 Hescheles emigrated to Israel , where she studied chemistry at the Technion in Haifa and received her doctorate in 1962. She married the physicist Kalman Altmann and they have two sons. Janina Altman stayed at the Technion as a scientist and also worked at the Weizmann Institute for Science and the Technical University of Munich . Their (joint) work has been published in international scientific journals such as Liebigs Annalen , Inorganic Chemistry , Chemischeberichte and Journal of Medicinal Chemistry . During her three-year research stay in Munich, she also dealt with the relationship of German scientists to National Socialism and wrote a monograph on it in 2007.

Altman has supported the pacifist group Women in Black since the First Intifada .

Publications

  • Janina Hescheles: Oczyma dwunastoletniej dziewczyny . Centralny Komitet Żydów Polskich, Cracow 1946
    • Janina Hescheles: With the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl . In: passed in the fire. Diaries from the ghetto . Translation from Polish Viktor Mika. Foreword by Arnold Zweig . Rütten & Loening, Berlin 1958, pp. 345-411
    • License issue:
      • Janina Hescheles: With the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl . In: passed in the fire. Diaries from the ghetto . Translation from Polish Viktor Mika. Foreword by Johann Christoph Hampe . Chr. Kaiser-Verlag, Munich 1963, pp. 151–189
  • 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. The White Rose. Students and intellectuals in Germany before and after Hitler came to power]. With German and English introduction. Pardes, Haifa 2007 (he)
    • First chapter in German translation by Inka Arroyo Antezana: Scientists before and after Hitler's rise to power . 2013 ( online ; PDF)

literature

  • Viktor Klemperer : Inferno and Nazi hell. Comments on the “Diaries from the Ghetto” , in: Neue deutsche literatur , 1959, pp. 245–252
  • Friedhilde Krause : My dear "sister" Janina Altmann in Haifa , in: the same: Experienced and shaped: memories from 80 years of life . With a foreword by Wolfgang Schmitz . Olms, Hildesheim 2009, pp. 99-102
  • Patricia Heberer: Children during the Holocaust . AltaMira Press, Lanham, Md. 2011, ISBN 978-0759119840 , pp. 151-153

Web links

Commons : Janina Altman  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Chwila , at YIVO
  2. ↑ With the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl , 1963, p. 153
  3. ^ Oberländer killed my father , in: Neues Deutschland , Ostberlin, February 11, 1960; Letter from Israel , in: Berliner Zeitung , June 6, 1961; “No money in the world can make amends. . . “An accusing letter from Israel , in: Der Mahnruf, Ostberlin, August / September 1961
  4. ↑ Lem was the son of a sister of her grandfather Hescheles: Mistrz Hemar , on Polskie Radio , February 11, 2011
  5. ↑ a b With the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl , 1963, pp. 151–189
  6. ↑ Władysław Bartoszewski : We are united by shed blood: Jews and Poles in the time of the “Final Solution” . ed. arrangement and translation by Nina Kozlowski. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1987 [first in Polish 1967]
  7. ↑ Friedhilde Krause : The Polish diary collection "Im fire passed" and its German reception , review, in: Zeitschrift für Slawistik: ZfSl, 1964, p. 318-325, here: p. 324
  8. ^ Foreword by Johann Christoph Hampe in: With the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl , 1963, p. 11
  9. ^ Women in Black , website
personal data
SURNAME Altman, Janina
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hescheles, Janina; Hesheles, Janina; Heszelesówna, Janka
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish-Israeli chemist and Holocaust survivor
DATE OF BIRTH January 2, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Lwów , Poland