Janina Bauman


Janina Bauman was a Polish journalist and writer of Jewish origin.

Biography

She was the daughter of Szymon Lewinson, a urologist and Polish Army officer murdered in Katyń, and of Alina, née Fryszman. She had one sister, Zofia. On her mother's side she was the granddaughter of the physician Aleksander Fryszman and the niece of Jerzy Fryszman and of Leon Płockier.
During World War II she was a prisoner of the Warsaw Ghetto with her mother and sister. They managed to escape and were sheltered by a peasant family in the countryside. After the war she studied journalism at the Warsaw Academy of Political and Social Science, where she met her future husband, Zygmunt Bauman. She subsequently worked in the film industry as a translator, researcher and script editor. She left Poland with her husband in 1968 after antisemitic purges, that followed the March 1968 events. They initially went to Israel, however, after three years they decided to settle permanently in Leeds, England, where she lived to the end of her life.
She married Zygmunt Bauman. They had three daughters.
In 2010 the Bauman Family established the Janina Bauman Prize to be awarded for a winning essay submitted to the Bauman Institute at the University of Leeds.

Books

In Polish
In English