A Square of Sky

A wartime childhood: from ghetto to convent

At the age of nine Janina David led a sheltered life with her prosperous Jewish family in Poland. A year later they were all on the verge of starvation, sharing a small room in the Warsaw ghetto. When it became clear that none of them was likely to survive, the thirteen-year-old girl was smuggled out to live with family friends. When their home became too dangerous, she was sent with false identity papers to a Catholic convent, where she lived in constant fear of being discovered. In this memoir David records the events around her through the eyes of a child, lonely and terrified, yet her determination to survive reads like a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.