Leja Jedwab / Lena Rozenberg (F / Poland, 1924-2005), Holocaust survivor

Leja Jedwab / Lena Rozenberg (F / Poland, 1924-2005), Holocaust survivor

• KEYWORDS : <Poland> <Refugee Children> <Soviet Union>

• MEMOIRS : Girl with Two Landscapes (2002)

Biography

Leja Jedwab was born in 1924 in Bialystok, Poland.

Book : Girl with Two Landscapes (2002)

• Girl with Two Landscapes: The Wartime Diary of Lena Jedwab (New York: Holmes & Meier, 2002).

It is the English edition of a diary written in Yiddish by Holocaust survivor Lena Jedwab Rozenberg during the war, 1941-45.

"In June, 1941, sixteen-year-old Lena Jedwab left Bialystok for summer camp in Russia - just when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Stranded by war in a children's home in Russia, Lena agonized over the unknown fate of her family and her precarious future. Lucky to be alive, nourished, and in school, yet consumed with anger at the war and the confusion of adolescence, Lena began to keep a diary. The diary chronicles her personal experiences of loneliness, pain, fear, and desire for love and recognition, as well as a vivid description of the world in which she then lived. Lena wrote her diary in Yiddish, not only because it was her mother tongue, but also as a conscious effort to maintain her Jewish identity. Her writing shows an exceptional literary talent, full of subtlety and sensitivity, and by using that talent, she has left us a moving testimony to one of history's darkest times."--Publisher description.

"Diary kept by a teenage girl from eastern Poland who left her Soviet-controlled town for a summer camp in Lithuania just weeks before the Nazis invaded her town. Describes her move deeper into the Soviet Union to schools and orphanages for refugee children as well as her fears for her family. Includes a semi-autobiographical short story which the author wrote during the war."--Holocaust Encyclopedia (USHMM).