| Born in 1930 to a middle class Jewish
family in Kalisz, anti-Semitism and the coming of war in 1939 destroyed
her comfortable life. She survived against all the odds, adopting a new
identity in a convent school. Neither of her parents survived the war and
she left Poland in 1946. The book covers the period from 1939 to 1946 and
is powerful and moving, showing what it was like to grow up in pre-war
Poland, the squalor and deprivation of life in the Warsaw ghetto and temporary
refuge with sympathetic non-Jewish friends - all through the eyes of a
child who doesn't quite comprehend what is happening.
After the war, Janina spent two years in
an international orphanage in Paris and emigrated to Australia just before
her eighteenth birthday. She worked in factories to support herself and
later continued her interrupted education and graduated from the University
of Melbourne. She settled in England in 1958 and subsequently worked as
a social worker in a large London hospital. |
