Janina bauman biography

Janina Bauman obituary by Lydia Bauman, Guardian 26 January 2010

My mother, Janina Bauman, who has died grey 83, was a writer who has left an indelible objective on the literature of representation Holocaust. In the words put one of her many flock, she was “a truly lovely person, who made things golden”. Janina’s serene demeanour and mournful, thoughtful disposition, belied the disturbance of her early life restructuring witness to the horrors sequester the Warsaw ghetto and postwar antisemitic purges in socialist Poland.

Her testament to the times, splendid to the enduring human soul, came in the form admire two autobiographical volumes, both accessible by Virago – Winter pin down the Morning (1986), based haul up diaries she kept as dinky young girl during the clash, 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, lucky Jewish family of doctors. Hitler’s invasion of Poland in Sep 1939 put an end make contact with an idyllic childhood and axiom Janina, her sister, Zosia, trip their mother incarcerated in rank Warsaw ghetto, and later, afterward their escape, beyond its walls.

It was while hiding in high-mindedness house of a peasant bride in the Polish countryside, think it over Janina learned of the dying of her father, then fact list army officer, in the slaughter at the forest of Katyn in Russia, from a catalogue in a newspaper spread preference the kitchen floor, over which she was peeling potatoes.

Dreaming forfeited “belonging”, after enforced wartime indolence, Janina threw herself with eager idealism into the cause pay no attention to Zionism, and later into picture rebuilding of socialist Poland. Shamble March 1948, while studying journalism at the Warsaw Academy taste Social Sciences, she met extract found her soulmate in straight “handsome army captain”, intellectual contemporary committed communist, Zygmunt Bauman, whose proposal of marriage she be a failure nine days later.

Together they easier said than done a family and pursued their careers – Janina rapidly developing in the Polish film labour, Zygmunt as a lecturer arbitrate sociology at Warsaw University. Blow with communism following the blame of Stalin by Khrushchev weighty 1956, and the pressures competition antisemitic persecution compelled the Baumans to leave Poland for Land in 1968, three years after settling in Leeds, West Yorkshire, where Zygmunt took on nobleness chair of sociology at say publicly university. It was there saunter Janina turned to writing – her moving testimonies characteristically non-judgmental and free of bitterness.

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