Ženi Lebl

Ženi Lebl was born in 1927 in Aleksinac

Lebl was born on 20 June 1927 in Aleksinac into a secular Ashkenazi Jewish family. Her father Leon was a mining engineer and her mother was Ana. In 1933 the family moved to Belgrade, and in 1940 she joined the underground League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia.

After the German occupation, her father was taken prisoner and her mother was later killed in a gas van at Sajmište camp. Lebl fled Belgrade in December 1941 and hid in Niš under a false name, where she printed Partisan material with her former teacher Jelena Glavaski. She was arrested in 1943, held in German prisons and camps, sentenced to death, and freed in Berlin in 1945.

Back in Belgrade she finished high school, studied at the University of Belgrade and worked for the newspaper Politika. In 1949 she was arrested over a joke about Tito and held in political prisons and camps, including Goli Otok.

She immigrated to Israel in 1954 and trained as an X-ray technician in Haifa. She worked at Poriya hospital and later taught and ran the radiography school at Ichilov hospital.

From the late 1970s she published books and articles in Hebrew and Serbo-Croatian on Balkan Jewish history and the Holocaust, and translated Hebrew literature. She won 26 prizes from the Federation of Jewish Communities in Yugoslavia. She died in Tel Aviv in 2009.