Ana Novac (1929–2010)

Ana Novac was born Zimra Harsanyi to a Jewish family in Dej, northern Transylvania, a region disputed between Romania and Hungary for decades. She was 14 years old when she was deported by the Hungarian Nazis to the death camp at Auschwitz, then to the Kraków-Płaszów slave labor camp and other smaller camps, and never saw her family again. She kept a journal on odd scraps of paper found in the campa. She was liberated at the end of World War II in Czechoslovakia. Following a long recuperation, she returned to Romania, where she began to have success as a playwright in the 1950s. In 1957, she was awarded the Romanian State Prize, but was increasingly targeted by the Communist regime. In 1965, she was allowed to leave the country and moved to Berlin, then settled in Paris, where she lived for the rest of her life. She published a number of books, including a Holocaust memoir, The Beautiful Days of My Youth, an important eyewitness account, first published in Hungarian in 1966 and translated into many other languages including English, French, German, Italian, and Dutch. In 2020, the Jewish State Theatre in Bucharest produced a stage adaptation of the memoir performed by an all-female cast.