Janina Hescheles Altman

Janina Hescheles Altman was born in Lvov, Poland (also called Lwów, now Lviv, Ukraine) where her father Henryk Hescheles was a journalist and publisher of the Zionist periodical Chwila. Her mother Amalia was a hospital registrar and after the outbreak of World War II, also served as a nurse. In 1939, the city was annexed by the Soviet Union. Then Nazi Germany invaded and conquered the city. Henryk Hescheles was murdered in a pogrom by the Ukrainian population. Janina's grandparents and other relatives were arrested and killed by the Germans. In 1943, her mother committed suicide and 12-year-old Janina was deported to the Janowska concentration and forced labor camp on the outskirts of Lvov. With help from Michał Borwicz, a writer, and the Polish Resistance organization Żegota, Janina was able to escape from Janowska a few months later. She went to Krakow and was hidden by various non-Jewish families and then in an orphanage in southern Poland. With Borwicz's encouragement, she began keeping a diary and writing her story. In 1946, soon after the war ended, her memoir was published in Polish as Oczyma dwunastoletniej dziewczyny (Through the Eyes of a 12-year-Old Girl). Later it was translated into 10 different languages. In 1950, Janina emigrated to Israel, where she earned a doctorate in chemistry in 1962 at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. She married Kalman Altman, a physicist, and had two sons. She worked as a scientist at Technion, the Weizmann Institute of Science, and the Technical University of Munich, Germany. Her research has been published in English and German scientific journals. She published an extensive study on the White Rose student resistance group in 2007. In 2020, her memoir was published in English as My Lvov: Holocaust Memoir of a 12-Year-Old Girl.