Janina David

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Janina David (actually Janina Dawidowicz ; born March 19, 1930 in Kalisz ) is a Polish-British writer and translator .

Life

Janina Dawidowicz was born as the only child into a wealthy Jewish family. She grew - as she describes it in A Piece of Heaven. Memories of a Childhood - Overprotected On.

After the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, her family fled from Kalisz to Warsaw and ended up in the Warsaw Ghetto , whose terrible everyday life Janina David describes in her memories. Her father Marek was employed as a police officer in the Jewish security service in the ghetto. This initially spared the family from being deported to an extermination camp . The parents managed to smuggle their daughter out of the ghetto. She was initially hidden from the family of Lydia Grabowski, a former friend of her father's. Her husband procured her forged identity documents. As "Danuta Teresa Markowska" she was accepted by the St. Francis sisters of the Mariens family ( Polish: Zgromadzenie Sióstr Franciszkanek Rodziny Maryi ) and brought to safety in their monastery in Płudy, outside Warsaw, from July 1943 to January 1944 . The sisters Janina Dawidowicz then hid in an orphanage in Warsaw and finally, when the orphanage had to be evacuated during the Warsaw Uprising , in Kostowiec, southwest of Warsaw. There she experienced the end of the war in Poland. Your father was probably murdered in the Majdanek concentration camp . Nothing is known of her mother's fate.

She left Poland in 1946. She first lived with an uncle in Paris , then emigrated to Australia , where she took the name Janina David and received a scholarship to study arts and social science at the University of Melbourne . In 1958 she returned to Europe and worked as a social worker in various London hospitals. Since 1978 she has been working full-time as an author and translator of books for children and young people and radio plays for the BBC, among others .

Janina David lives in London .

Fonts

as an author
  • A piece of heaven. Memories of a childhood. (Original title: A Square of Sky. The Recollections of a Childhood. Translated by Hannelore Neves). 2nd edition, dtv, Munich 2010 (German first edition by Hanser, Munich 1981), ISBN 978-3-423-62442-8 .
  • A piece of earth. The end of a childhood. (Original title: A Touch of Earth. Translated by Hannelore Neves). dtv, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-423-62069-2 .
  • A piece of stranger. Memories of a youth. (Original title: Light over the Water. Post-war wanderings 1946-1948. Translated by Gertrud Baruch). dtv, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-423-62086-2 .
  • Part of the whole. (Original title: A Part of the Main. Translated by Helmut Kossodo ). Droemer Knaur, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-426-02353-9 .
  • Second hand life . Novel. Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-596-24744-6 (translated by Michaela Huber).
  • The pearl of wisdom . Stories. Knaur, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-426-60178-8 (translated by Jakob Leutner).
  • Eurydice's eyes . Stories. Berliner Taschenbuchverlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-8333-0123-6 (translated by Gesine Stempel).
as a translator
  • Joseph Zíemian: The Cigarette Sellers of Three Crosses Square . Avon Books, New York, NY 1977, ISBN 0-380-00967-6 .

Filmography

Franz Peter Wirth (1919–1999) filmed the book Ein Stück Himmel for ARD (→  film ). The then fifteen-year-old Czech leading actress Dana Vávrová (1967–2009) also became popular in Germany with this role.

Awards

literature

  • Evelyn Keidel: From Judaism to Christianity - and back. The psychological consequences of a forced change of religion among Jewish child survivors during the Shoah . Internationalismus-Verlag, Hannover 2014, ISBN 978-3-922218-41-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Mark Paul (ed.): Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy. The Testimony of Survivors . Polish Educational Foundation in North America, Toronto 2009, p. 68.
  2. ↑ Hartwig Schmidt, Janina David: A piece of heaven The film book. Based on the memories of Janina David. Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1986, ISBN 978-3-446-14693-8 .
personal data
SURNAME David, Janina
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish-British writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 19, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Warsaw