Alice Schwarz-Gardos

Alice Schwarz-Gardos was born in 1916 in Vienna

Schwarz-Gardos was born in Vienna in 1916. Her father was a manager at the Vienna Union-Bank and was forced to retire after the 1929 stock market crash. The family then moved to Bratislava.

In Bratislava she attended the German Realgymnasium and began studying medicine. She wrote her first articles for Der Grenzbote and won a youth writing prize from the Neue Freie Presse in 1935.

Her family fled the Nazis and moved to Palestine in 1939. At first she took any work she found, such as waitress or saleswoman. In 1942 she became a secretary for the Royal Navy.

From 1949 she was an editor at the German-language daily Yedioth Hayom and a press officer for the Jewish Agency. From the 1960s she reported from Israel for European papers and wrote 11 books in German. In 1975 she became editor-in-chief of Israel-Nachrichten.

In 1964 she married composer Eli Gardos, her third marriage. In 1994 she donated her newspaper collection to the Exile Library in Vienna. She died in Tel Aviv in 2007.