Janina David

Janina David was born Janina Dawidowicz in Kalisz in 1930, the only child of a Jewish family that moved to Warsaw when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. There she experienced the progressive destruction of their former life and the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto.

In 1943, aged thirteen, she escaped from the ghetto with the help of a Polish acquaintance. She was given false papers and eventually hidden in a Catholic convent, where she had to pass as a Christian. Her parents and the other members of her immediate family were killed during the Holocaust.

A Square of Sky starts out by exploring the world of an ordinary, sheltered nine-year-old girl— family holidays, school, food, friends—and allows the catastrophe to emerge through the child’s changing perception of a happy middle-class childhood descending into hunger, terror and the ghetto.

The book’s sequel, A Touch of Earth (1966), takes her from the later period in the ghetto through her escape, hiding and the end of the war.

When the war ended, David was fifteen and alone. She went to Paris with an uncle in 1946, spent two years there and then emigrated to Australia. She completed her education and studied at the University of Melbourne, taking a BA. In 1958 she moved to London, initially finding employment as a social worker.

She began writing her autobiography in 1959. A third volume, Light Over the Water, covering her postwar wanderings from 1946–48, appeared much later, in 1995.

She subsequently had a substantial career as a writer and translator of children’s and young people’s books, and also wrote radio plays, including work for the BBC. Her short stories, The Prince and the Baker’s Daughter, is published by EnvelopeBooks under its PostcardBooks imprint.

A Square of Sky was successful enough to be adapted several times. In Germany it became the television series Ein Stück Himmel, and gave her a degree of celebrity. The actress Dana Vávrová played Janina; David, the director Franz Peter Wirth and Vávrová received Germany’s Goldener Gong award in 1982. The memoir was also adapted for the stage.

It was subsequently republished in Britain by Eland in 1992, combining A Square of Sky and A Touch of Earth in a single volume. Caroline Moorehead, reviewing the Eland edition in The Independent, noted the particular power of survivor narratives told from within the experience itself rather than retrospectively imposing the full historical meaning on it.