Janina David

Janina David / Janina Dawidowicz (F / Poland, 1930), Holocaust survivor.

• KEYWORDS : <Warsaw Ghetto> <Hidden Children> -- <France> <Australia>

• MEMOIRS : A Square of Sky (1964) / A Touch of Earth (1966) / Light Over the Water (1995)

Biography

Janina David was born on 19 March 1930 as the only child to a Jewish Polish family, and moved with them to Warsaw in 1939.[2] After she escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943,[3] taking refuge with a Polish family of Henryk Rajski and then in a convent,[2] and her parents had died as victims of the holocaust, she left Poland in 1946 and moved to Paris with an uncle.[1] She then emigrated to Australia where she completed school and studied at the University of Melbourne, gaining a B.A.. She then took Australian citizenship.[1] In 1958, she moved to London, where she was a social worker in some hospitals. In 1959 she began to write her three-volume autobiography, A Square of Sky, A Touch of Earth and Light over the Water.[1][3] Since 1978, she has been working as an author and translator of children's and young people's books, and of radio plays, for the BBC and others.

Book : A Square of Sky (1964)

• A Square of Sky: A Jewish Childhood in Wartime Poland. Repr. 1992 & 2005.

The true, devastating story of a Jewish child's survival in wartime Poland, while the rest of her family were killed by the Nazis. Like The Diary of Anne Frank, but by a survivor who, instead of her own death, has to come to terms with the death of her parents and her own survival. Made into a massively successful film in Germany, where the author played a crucial role in excavating the legacy of the Holocaust by lecturing on her life.

Book : A Touch of Earth (1966)

• A Touch of Earth: A Wartime Childhood. Also translated into German and French. Reprinted 1992.

This is the second book in Janina David's memoirs of childhood during the Second World War as a Jewish teenager in Poland. She has left the ghetto and - just like any Jewish person in that place and at that time - tries to survive.

Book : Light Over the Water (1995)

• Light Over the Water: Post-war Wanderings 1946-48

Last part of her autobiographical trilogy is a fascinating account of a turbulent time in world history seen through the eyes of a young girl.