Halina Nelken (1924–2009)

Halina Nelken was born to a Jewish family in Kraków, Poland, a daughter of Emanuel and Regina Nelken. She was a 15-year-old living a comfortable middle-class life when Nazi Germany invaded her country in World War II. Like many other girls her age, she recorded her personal observations and feelings in a diary. As conditions for Jews in Kraków deteriorated and her family was forced into the Jewish ghetto, she continued to write, eventually smuggling her diary out with a Catholic friend. Halina was sent to eight Nazi concentration camps, including Plaszow, Auschwitz, and Ravensbröck but survived. After the war, she pursued a career as an art historian, moving to the USA in 1959. She married and had a son, and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She also became a noted writer and lecturer, with books that included Alexander von Humboldt: His Portraits and Their Artists and Images of a Lost World: Jewish Motifs in Polish Painting, 1770-1945. Her own Holocaust memoir, And Yet, I am Here! (1999) was based on her diary entries from 1938 to 1943, supplemented by recollections written shortly after World War II and by later commentaries and explanatory notes that she added in the mid-1980s. The book was published in Polish and German editions as well as in English.