Literatureקורדליה אדוורדסון

Cordelia Edvardson

Cordelia Edvardson was a German-born Swedish journalist, author and Holocaust survivor who was the Jerusalem correspondent for Svenska Dagbladet from 1977 to 2006.

1929 to 2012Surviving Theresienstadt and AuschwitzAutobiography Burned Child Seeks the FireReporting from Jerusalem for Svenska Dagbladet

Born: 1 January 1929, Munich
Died: 29 October 2012, Stockholm
Occupation: writer, journalist, autobiographer, poet

Cordelia Edvardson was born in 1929 in Munich

Edvardson was born in Munich in 1929 and was raised Catholic. Her father, Hermann Heller, was Jewish, and her maternal grandfather was a Jew who converted to Catholicism. Under Nazi racial rules she was classified as fully Jewish.

In 1941 she was forced to wear the yellow star. Her mother tried to get her out of Germany, and an adoption by a Spanish couple gave her Spanish citizenship. After the Gestapo pressured her into signing a document, she was arrested and deported to Theresienstadt in 1944 and from there to Auschwitz.

After World War II she moved to Sweden and began working as a journalist. In 1984 she published an autobiography about her life as a Holocaust survivor, titled Burned Child Seeks the Fire in English. The book won her the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis.

From 1977 to 2006 she was the Jerusalem correspondent of the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet. She reported widely on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and kept writing a column for the paper after 2006. She died of an illness in Stockholm on 29 October 2012.