Janina Altman

Janina Altman was born in 1931 in Lviv

Janina Hescheles was born in Lviv in 1931. Her father, Henryk Hescheles, was a journalist and the publisher of the Polish-language Zionist periodical Chwila. Her mother worked as a registrar at a hospital and later also as a nurse.

After the Germans took Lviv in June 1941, her father was murdered in a pogrom. She and her family were imprisoned by the Nazis and forced to work in armaments factories. With help from the writer Michał Borwicz and the Polish group Żegota, she escaped the Janowska camp in October 1943.

While in hiding, she began writing a memoir of the persecution in Lviv. It was published in Polish in 1946 and later in German and other languages. In 1950 she moved to Israel, lived at Kibbutz Kfar Blum and served in the Nahal and the navy.

She began studying chemistry at the Technion in 1953 and earned a doctorate there. She worked at the Technion, the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Technical University of Munich. She married the physicist Kalman Altman, and they had 2 sons.

She protested West Germany's handling of Nazi criminals and its ties with Israel. In March 1960 she was arrested and tried for joining a protest against a meeting between David Ben-Gurion and Konrad Adenauer. She supported Women in Black from the First Intifada and died in 2022.