Hanna Lévy-Hass (1913–2001)
Autore di Diary of Bergen-Belsen: 1944-1945
Sull'Autore
Opere di Hanna Lévy-Hass
Diario di Bergen-Belsen 1 copia
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Nome canonico
- Lévy-Hass, Hanna
- Nome legale
- Lévy-Hass, Hanna
- Altri nomi
- לוי־הס, חנה
- Data di nascita
- 1913-03-18
- Data di morte
- 2001-06-10
- Sesso
- female
- Nazionalità
- Yugoslavia (birth)
Israel - Luogo di nascita
- Sarajevo, Yugoslavia
- Luogo di morte
- Jerusalem, Israel
- Luogo di residenza
- Jerusalem, Israel
Montenegro
Sarajevo, Bosnia - Attività lavorative
- teacher
feminist
diarist
Holocaust survivor - Relazioni
- Hass, Amira (daughter)
- Breve biografia
- Hanna Lévy-Hass was born to a Sephardic Jewish family in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia (then Bosnia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire), a daughter of Jakob and Rifka Levi. She studied in Belgrade in the 1930s. In 1940, she was working as a teacher in Montenegro, an area under Italian control in the early years of World War II, and living a relatively quiet life. That all changed in 1943 when Nazi Germany invaded and occupied the region. In February 1944, Hanna was arrested and held by the Gestapo at the Bogdanov Kraj prison in Cetinje for six months before being deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. She began keeping a diary there in August 1944. In April 1945, as the Allies approached, the Nazis put her on a train to the concentration camp at Terezín (Theresienstadt) in Czechoslovakia. Like many of her fellow prisoners, she was sick with typhus. During a short stopover, Hanna managed to get off the train to search for food. When she came back, the train had left. It seemed to be a fortunate accident, as the area was soon taken over by the Red Army. However, her ordeal was not yet over. She was viewed with suspicion by the locals and the Russian soldiers, who turned her away. It was weeks before she was able to find sanctuary with a group of other displaced persons. After the war, she married Abraham Hass, a fellow survivor from Romania, and moved to Israel, where she worked as an activist and feminist. Her diary was first published in English in 1982 and has been translated into several other languages. The 2011 English edition, Diary of Bergen-Belsen: 1944-1945, also includes an introduction and afterword by Israel journalist Amira Hass, her daughter.
Utenti
Recensioni
I'm sorry this diary was ignored by the public for so long, for it's one of the very few diaries to come out of a concentration camp. Its author was a very educated, intelligent woman who spoke several languages and certainly knew how to write. I'm amazed that, starving and sick in Bergen-Belsen with people dying all around her, Hanna Levy-Hass was able to teach the children, write these amazingly detailed diary entries, and even have philosophical conversations with others about the nature of ethics in a concentration camp.
At one point she writes, "Our existence has something cruel, beastly about it. Everything human is reduced to zero [...] We have not died, but we are dead."
The reader should be aware that the introduction and afterword take up 70 pages of this slim book. Hanna Levy-Hass's daughter is a journalist in Israel and a Palestinian rights activist, and she writes about her mother's pre-war background and post-war wanderings, as well as her own experiences as a child of two Holocaust survivors. The introduction provides helpful biographical information, but the afterword, though beautifully written, can be skipped over entirely.… (altro)
At one point she writes, "Our existence has something cruel, beastly about it. Everything human is reduced to zero [...] We have not died, but we are dead."
The reader should be aware that the introduction and afterword take up 70 pages of this slim book. Hanna Levy-Hass's daughter is a journalist in Israel and a Palestinian rights activist, and she writes about her mother's pre-war background and post-war wanderings, as well as her own experiences as a child of two Holocaust survivors. The introduction provides helpful biographical information, but the afterword, though beautifully written, can be skipped over entirely.… (altro)
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Statistiche
- Opere
- 3
- Utenti
- 71
- Popolarità
- #245,552
- Voto
- 4.2
- Recensioni
- 2
- ISBN
- 11
- Lingue
- 4
- Preferito da
- 1
Hanna Lévy was thirty-one when she was sent to Bergen-Belsen in the summer of 1944. The camp was no longer an internment camp in which Jews who could possibly be exchanged were held - conditions then did not necessarily lead to death; now it had become a concentration camp. Unlike Auschwitz where death came in the way of industrial production, in Bergen-Belsen death came through starvation, brutality, lice, no sanitation under unbelievable crowded conditions, filth and stench, disease and epidemics. Her diary of life in Bergen-Belsen is a unique testament of life in hell where the walking, dying skeletons can no longer be recognised as humans.
She understands herself as a political woman - her Jewish identity, the reason she has been imprisoned, is secondary (Schröder 2010, 138). She adheres to communist ideals of equality, she takes an active part fighting against the corruption among the prisoners for the benefit of the whole group, she starts teaching the children.
The last entry is from April 1945. Hanna Lévy was one of 7000 Jews who were transported in three trains between the 6th and 11th April with the aim of reaching Terezín. She was liberated by the Red Army before the train reached its destination.
What a courageous and sincere woman! Determent and refusing to submit at least in spirit to ruthless control and deprivation. And just as courageous and sincere is her daughter Amira Hass, who is a journalist writing for the daily Haaretz newspaper.
In the two essays Amira Hass provides the family background of her mother and tells about her parents later lives. Emil Kerenji describes the linguistic and political context of Yugoslavia between the wars.
This diary from Bergen-Belsen is a unique document as only very few secret recordings made from within german concentration camps have come down to us. Why then is it so little known?
Hanna Lévy-Hass wrote the diary in Serbo-Croatian; she transcribed it when she returned to Yugoslavia. The original diary seems to be lost. Later she translated it into French. It was first published in French and German in 1961 (Geisel 1991, cited in Schröder 2010, 133) (VI-20)
Schröder, Dominique: Semantics of the self. Preservation and construction of identity in concentration camp diaries, InterDisciplines. Journal of History and Sociology (2010) 2, 123-144 (https://www.inter-disciplines.org/index.php/indi/article/view/936)… (altro)