Janina gets some books she used to read a few...

  • YES
  • Janina gets some books she used to read a few years ago, when she was at home. She reads them with pious concentration and recalls her wonderful childhood memories...her nursery, the afternoon teas, when she used to recite poems, the taste of candied fruit, Stefa's voice calling her for dinner...but the present comes back quickly. She is in the ghetto, in Warsaw, behind walls, surrounded by a cordon of armed men who did not hesitate to kill children.

  • 1942-00-00
  • 1942-00-00
  • Winter, 1942
  • in the ghetto
  • private life / daily life
  • atmosphere, children, everyday life
  • At the age of nine Janina David was leading a sheltered life with her prosperous Jewish family in Poland. One year later they were all facing starvation in the Warsaw ghetto.
    In the memoirs of wartime childhood Janina David describes the family\'s struggle against insurmountable odds. When it becomes clear that none of them was likely to survive, the thirteen-year old girl was smuggled out of the ghetto to live with family friends - a Polish woman and her German - born husband. When their home becomes too dangerous, she was sent with false identity papers to a Catholic convent, where she lived in constant fear of being discovered.

  • 207-208
  • Related people:

    • David Janina

      She was born in Poland, the only child of a middle-class Jewish family. She lost her parents during the war years an...