literature
Writer Janina David dies
Janina David in 1981. The writer died at the age of photo
© Istvan Bajzat/dpa
She survived the horrors of the Nazi era and talked about it in her childhood memories. Now the author Janina David has died.
The writer and Holocaust survivor who became known for her autobiographical work “A Piece of Heaven”. Janina David is dead. The dtv publishing house confirmed this on Monday at the request of the German Press Agency. David died on October 22nd in London at the age of 93.
David, who was born in Kalisz, Poland, in 1930, wrote down her childhood memories of expulsion, flight and hunger in three volumes. Parts of it were filmed in a television series (ARD) broadcast from 1982 under the title of the first volume “A Piece of Heaven”. David was played in it by the Czech actress Dana Vávrová, who received numerous awards for it.
The dtv publishing house, which last published “A Piece of Heaven” in an updated edition in 2017, praised David’s work as a “unique contemporary document” in which it makes the endless suffering tangible through the eyes of a child. The volume was first published in German in 1981 by Carl Hanser Verlag.