Winter in the Morning; A Young Girl's Life in the Warsaw Ghetto and Beyond, 1939-1945

New York: The Free Press, A Division of Macmillan, Inc, 1986. First American Edition [stated]. Hardcover. Very Good/Very good. Zygmunt Bauman (Author photograph), John Collier (. x, [2], 195, [1] pages. Frontis illustration. Includes Acknowledgments, Why? And Why Now?; Postscript; and Chronology. The Free Press, A Division of Macmillan, Inc. Chapters cover The Peaceful Years; Border Street; Behind the Walls; The Walls Tighten Around Us; Beyond the Walls; On the Run; Out of Hiding; and Winter into Spring. Also includes Postscript and Chronology. The coming-of-age of a young girl during World War II. She was born to a wealthy doctor, then she and her family were rounded up and imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto to live a disease-ridden, hand-to-mouth existence, always in the presence of death. The family then escaped to the "Aryan" side where they had to slip from one safe-house to another, in constant fear of discovery and under the constant threat of blackmail. Janina Bauman (née Lewinson; 18 August 1926, in Warsaw - 29 December 2009, in Leeds) was a Polish journalist and writer of Jewish origin. She was the daughter of Szymon Lewinson (1896-1940), a urologist and Polish Army officer murdered in the Katyn massacre. During World War II she was a prisoner in the Warsaw Ghetto with her mother and sister. They managed to escape and were sheltered by a peasant family in the countryside. After the war she studied journalism at the Warsaw Academy of Political and Social Science, where she met her future husband, Zygmunt Bauman. She subsequently worked in the film industry as a translator, researcher and script editor. She left Poland with her husband in 1968 after the anti-Semitic purges, that followed the March 1968 events. Janina Bauman's deeply moving account of her life in the Warsaw ghetto of Nazi-occupied Poland from 1939 to 1945 is much more than a testimony of wartime suffering and brutality. Based on the diaries she kept forty years ago, it is a remarkable record of a young teenage girl's coming-of-age in a time of unspeakable horror: her thoughts and emotions; her relationships with beloved family and friends; her first love; and her struggle to forge an identity in a world gone mad. Winter in the Morning dramatically, yet unsentimentally, captures Janina's increasing self-awareness as it chronicles her forced flight from an idyllic middle-European childhood into an uncertain future shadowed by death. While existing on the edge of fear--constantly moving from one "safehouse" to another, near starvation, with nothing but a few ill-fitting clothes and memories--she becomes a young woman, learning the joy of love and the pain of loss, questioning the existence of God and the meaning of life, discovering the grievous truth about cruelty and its dehumanizing effect. Here, too are the daring people, who, out of greed and, occasionally, generosity and love, risked death to keep the innocent girl and her family alive. An extraordinary story of courage and survival, Winter in the Morning is an invaluable addition to the historical literature of this century--and an unforgettable personal memoir.