The TV film adaptation of her life story made the horror of the Holocaust tangible in German living rooms: The writer and Holocaust survivor Janina David, who became known for her autobiographical work “A Piece of Heaven”, is dead. This was confirmed by the DTV publishing house on Monday at the request of the German press. Agency citing the Davids family. She died on October 22nd in London at the age of 93.
David, who was born into a Jewish family in Kalisz, Poland, in 1930, wrote down her childhood memories of expulsion, flight and hunger in a total of 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.
David only survived the war because her parents managed to smuggle her out of the Warsaw Ghetto and place her in the care of Catholic nuns. However, she never saw her parents and most of her relatives again. She later lived in Paris, Australia and finally London, where she decided to write her life story on paper as a memorial to her loved ones.
Gabriele Leja, who looked after David for many years as program manager of the Hanser series at dtv, praised the author in the dpa interview as an impressive person who had a very fine manner. Leja remembers that she acknowledged the success of her books and the TV series in Germany with goodwill.
The dtv publishing house, which last published “A Piece of Heaven” in an updated edition in 2017, described David’s work as a “unique contemporary document” in which she made the endless suffering tangible through the eyes of a child. In doing so, she “touched the core of many young people,” said Leja, who considers David’s books to be indispensable for keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive. This is particularly important in times when anti-Semitism is on the rise again.
