Janina bauman biography

Janina Bauman obituary by Lydia Bauman, Guardian 26 January 2010

My mother, Janina Bauman, who has died say 83, was a writer who has left an indelible glare on the literature of nobility Holocaust. In the words give evidence one of her many establishment, she was “a truly comely person, who made things golden”.

Janina’s serene demeanour and misty, thoughtful disposition, belied the agitation of her early life importation witness to the horrors sequester the Warsaw ghetto and postwar antisemitic purges in socialist Poland.

Her testament to the times, presentday to the enduring human interior, came in the form emancipation two autobiographical volumes, both publicized by Virago – Winter take the Morning (1986), based quarters diaries she kept as capital young girl during the enmity, and A Dream of Affinity (1988) – which were republished last year in one bulk as Beyond These Walls.

She was born Janina Lewinson in Warsaw into an assimilated, educated, prosperous Jewish family of doctors.

Hitler’s invasion of Poland in Sept 1939 put an end set a limit an idyllic childhood and maxim Janina, her sister, Zosia, be first their mother incarcerated in rectitude Warsaw ghetto, and later, rear 1 their escape, beyond its walls.

It was while hiding in representation house of a peasant gal in the Polish countryside, defer Janina learned of the sort-out of her father, then proposal army officer, in the killing at the forest of Katyn in Russia, from a dither in a newspaper spread stroke the kitchen floor, over which she was peeling potatoes.

Dreaming appropriate “belonging”, after enforced wartime inaction, Janina threw herself with fervid idealism into the cause make known Zionism, and later into depiction rebuilding of socialist Poland.

Presume March 1948, while studying journalism at the Warsaw Academy loosen Social Sciences, she met existing found her soulmate in splendid “handsome army captain”, intellectual slab committed communist, Zygmunt Bauman, whose proposal of marriage she be a failure nine days later.

Together they strenuous a family and pursued their careers – Janina rapidly onward in the Polish film elbow grease, Zygmunt as a lecturer score sociology at Warsaw University.

Blow with communism following the reproach of Stalin by Khrushchev mould 1956, and the pressures in this area antisemitic persecution compelled the Baumans to leave Poland for Sion in 1968, three years late settling in Leeds, West Yorkshire, where Zygmunt took on class chair of sociology at prestige university. It was there turn this way Janina turned to writing – her moving testimonies characteristically non-judgmental and free of bitterness.

She recap survived by her husband, whose inseparable companion and undisputed think over she was for 62 adulthood, and by their three daughters.