Lena Jedwab Rozenberg (1924–2005)

Lena Jedwab Rozenberg (originally Léa or Leja) was born to a Jewish family in Bialystok, Poland, a daughter of Lajb and Freide-Rive Jedwab. She was 16 years old in June 1941, when she left her home and arrived in Druskenik, Lithuania, for what she thought would be a summer vacation, just as Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The summer camp was evacuated and she was left completely on her own. Her letters home went unanswered. Only years later did she learn that her whole family had been murdered by the Nazis at the Treblinka death camp. She spent the years 1941 to 1943 in a children's home in Karakulino in western Russia. In October 1941, she began keeping a diary, written in Yiddish, in which she agonized over the unknown fate of her family, the hardships of wartime life, and the uncertainties of her future.

Eventually, Lena mastered Russian and found some comfort participating in drama groups, student government, the Komsomol (Young Communist) organization, and literary activities. She excelled academically and in 1943 was accepted at Bauman Technical Institute in Moscow. She went on to study the humanities and German at Moscow State University. At the end of the war, despite her success in joining the Russian intelligentsia, she was driven back to Poland by a wave of officially-sponsored anti-Semitism. In 1947, she married Szulim (Sholem) Rozenberg, a tailor, and emigrated with him to France the following year. They settled in Paris and had three children. Her diary was originally published in Yiddish in 1999 and has since been translated into other languages. In 2002, her daughter Dorothée Rozenberg arranged to publish an English translation as Girl with Two Landscapes: The Wartime Diary of Lena Jedwab, 1941–1945.