Ana Novac, (nee Zimra Harsany) ‘The Romanian Anne Frank’
(b. Dej, Transylvania, 21 June 1929)
Actress, playwright, poet, novelist Auschwitz, Kratzau, Plaszow camps survivor, exile living in Paris
Selected Quotations
On a Deaf God:
- Why are they screaming?
-They are saying their prayers.
-But why scream?
-Just in case, on the off chance that the good Lord is busy elsewhere, or is born deaf.
Biography (Excerpt)
Ana Novac’s fame stems from her extraordinary journals written as a fifteen-year old in Auschwitz and in six other concentration camps. As a Transylvanian Jew in the Hungarian-occupied part of Romania, Novac was deported by the Hungarian Nazis in June 1944. She wrote her impressions on odd scraps of paper found in the camp. Her Auschwitz journals have been compared to those of Anne Frank. After her release from her seventh and last concentration camp at Kratzau, Novac had spent one year in concentration camps, followed by twenty years in a communist dictatorship of the newly installed communist regime in Romania.
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