marching song

The life of the pursuer of justice her entire life was a continuous struggle: from her childhood in the ghetto to her struggle for equality

Dr. Yanina Hashels-Altman passed away last week, when she was 93 years old. She was born in Lviv and when she was ten years old, Nazi German soldiers entered her city. She fought for her life and wrote a diary from a hiding place. Later, she immigrated to Israel and was a peace activist. "Brave, a fighter and has an independent opinion" | Shir Lakht

Eli Ashkenazi

08/13/2022

Saturday, August 13, 2022, 11:20 a.m. Updated: 11:31 a.m.

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"Brave woman".

Yanina Hashels-Altman and her parents, April 1941 (photo: Yad Vashem)

When Shinina Shales was ten years old, Nazi German soldiers entered her city of residence, Lviv.

The Russians fled and the German army gave way to Ukrainian nationalists who began to rampage with the Jews.

Yanina went with her father, Henrik.

Public figure, Zionist activist and editor of a Jewish newspaper in Polish.

They saw a group of locals abusing the Jews.

"You are already ten years old and from now on you have to be independent. Don't pay attention to what other people are doing. Be yourself, you brave!"

Her father told her and added: "Never cry, crying humiliates a person, in happiness and in disaster. Now go home and leave me here."

Since then, Yanina has not seen her father again.

She embarked on a life journey and survived.

The father's last words remained in her as a testament.

All her life she was a brave woman, a fighter and one with an independent opinion and fought to remain so.

Last month, Dr. Yanina Hashels-Altman passed away and she is 93 years old.

"Began a journey to life and survived."

Yanina Altman at the Ghetto Fighters House (photo: official website, courtesy of the Ghetto Fighters House archive)

She was born in 1931 in Lviv to Henrik and Amelia-Lusia Shels.

The father edited the newspaper Chwila ("moment" in Polish), the mother was a nurse in a hospital.

In September 1939, control of Lviv passed from Poland to Soviet sovereignty.

Her father was arrested and held for ten months in prison.

After that, the parents began working to obtain an immigration certificate to Palestine.

A photo of Yanina with her parents from the spring of 1941 was intended for this purpose.

But in June the Germans invaded the city.

Henrik was murdered in the first pogrom after the German occupation, on June 30, 1941. Later there were other pogroms in the city in which thousands of Jews were murdered.

Yanina's mother was fired from her job and started working as a nurse in a Jewish hospital that operated underground.

Various sanctions were imposed on the Jews and they were forced to wear a ribbon with a Star of David on their arm.

In November 1941 they were put into the ghetto in the city.

During 1942, the "actions" to the Belzec extermination camp began.

Most of Yanina's family members, including her grandfather and grandmother, were sent there and murdered.

She and her mother managed to hide, but were arrested and put in a prison inside the ghetto.

Conditions in the prison were extremely harsh and occasionally prisoners were executed.

Friends of the family collected money and bribed a guard at the prison and he released the two.

The situation inside the ghetto was getting worse.

The hunger was severe and the sanitation conditions were poor.

Many died of typhus.

Thousands were murdered in killing pits and some were also killed in battles of resistance to the Germans and their helpers.

When the situation was already lost, Emma decided to fortify herself with a group of rebels.

She gave Lenina the little money she had and told her: "Spare me the last torture and go away. I no longer want to know what will happen to you, I just don't want you to stay with me. Go, if you love me."

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"She had an opinion."

Yanina and her parents Henrik and Amelia, spring 1941 (photo: official website, courtesy of the archives of the Ghetto Fighters House)

11-year-old Yanina still tried to convince her mother that they would stay together and die hugging, but in the end she gave in to her mother's pleas and separated from her.

Now she was left alone in the world.

Later she learned that her mother, her friends, and her friends were caught and committed suicide together by swallowing cyanide in their possession.

Yanina was put in the Yanovska labor camp near Lviv.

Even there the conditions were difficult with severe manifestations of cruelty and executions.

In the inferno of the camp, cultural life was conducted underground and Yanina, the girl who started writing poems, also joined those meetings.

"Those days of suffering and horror, under the shadow of death, many Jews developed the desire to find some form of expression for their feelings," she later told Meir HaReuvani, a reporter for the Lemerhav newspaper.

According to her, "Dozens of painters, poets, and writers grew up in the concentration camps and ghettos at that time. Writing and painting were literally the last elixir of life for them and they clung to this work as the altar beams of their salvation."

The person who led those meetings was a writer and poet named Michael Borovich.

His friends from the Polish socialist underground managed to smuggle him out of the camp and he insisted that more would escape.

Yanina was also among the escapees.

One of the songs written by Yanina Shels during the war (photo: official website, courtesy of the archives of the Ghetto Fighters House)

After she escaped, the Zegota organization withdrew its protection.

This is a committee for the aid of the Jews, which was an organization to save Jews in which Jews and non-Jews worked together.

She was smuggled to Krakow and handed over to Miriam (Maruda) Hochberg-Pleg (Marianska) who hid her and took care of her in hiding places until the end of the war.

Among the families that also hid her were Christian Poles, one of them, Wanda Janowska-Wiczek who was active in Zagota, was also awarded the right of the Righteous Among the Nations.

Wanda was a beautician.

During the day she received clients at her house, and in the evening the house became a focus for underground activity, the main of which was forging documents.

At home, Yanina wrote a diary at Miriam-Maruda's request.

In her diary, she described in detail life in the Lviv ghetto and in the Janowska camp.

"I sat and wrote for five consecutive days, without erasures and without a draft," she told the director Chen Shelah who made a film about her for the Gita Warriors Museum.

"This is a girl who experienced the death of her father as soon as the Germans entered Lviv... this is a girl who experienced the death of her mother... a girl who tried to express what she felt in writing," Hochberg-Pleg wrote about her.

Noam Rahmilevich, the archivist of the Gita Fighters House, emphasizes the importance of the diary that was written in real time, just three weeks after she escaped from the Yanboska camp.

He points out that in the May 1944 operation in which the underground escaped a microfilm from Warsaw to the West that contained 120 photos with vital information revealing the situation of the Jews in Poland, there were also photos of Yanina's diary.

"I see a 12-year-old girl"

Shortly after the end of the war, the diary was published as a book in Polish called "In the eyes of a 12-year-old girl", by the district Jewish historical committee in Krakow.

A German translation was later published in East Germany (1958) and in 11 other languages.

Only a few years ago it was also translated into Hebrew (published by "Pardes").

In the summer of 1944, Hochberg-Pleg managed to find her a safer place and transferred her to the hands of Jadwiga Szczalecka who ran an orphanage in the village of Poronin, near Zakopane.

The orphanage was originally located in Warsaw, but due to the Polish uprising the children and staff were evacuated from Warsaw to Poronin.

In the orphanage, Szczalecka hid about twenty Jewish children.

Hochberg-Pleg wrote that Szzelecka's offer to take in the girl Yanina "was a blessing from heaven and these last months of the war gave Lenina a chance to break free from her nightmare."

She was in the orphanage, which moved to Tsopot after the war, until 1949.

In 1950 she immigrated to Israel alone.

She served two years in the army and after her release began studying chemistry at the Technion.

She married Kalman Altman who studied physics at the Technion.

Both advanced in the academic track and later Dr. Yanina Altman researched and taught at the Technion, the Weizmann Institute and the Technical University of Munich. Her research was published in scientific journals in English and German. Her partner, Professor Kalman Altman, was a lecturer and researcher at the Technion. The couple had two sons - Zvika and Eitan. In the program On the radio "Hakol Politi" in the voice of the Upper Galilee dedicated to Shels-Altman, the two told that when they were children their mother did not tell them anything about what she went through in the Holocaust, because she wanted to protect them. Over the years she began to share her past, especially with her grandchildren who were interested in it.

Excerpt from the diary written by Yanina Shels while hiding in Krakow in the fall of 1943 (photo: official website, courtesy of the archives of the Ghetto Fighters House)

Her attitude to Germany and its past was not one-dimensional.

On the one hand, she opposed accepting the payments and fought to whitewash the past of senior officials with a Nazi past who were integrated into the post-war German government.

Thus, for example, she protested the conclusions of a committee that investigated Theodor Oberlander's past.

Oberlander was a minister in the West German government in the 1950s, despite his past as a Gestapo officer.

In the face of a protest that arose, a committee examined the claims that he was a significant figure in the pogroms in Lviv as commander of the "Nighteagle" battalion and cleared him of this.

Chancellor Adenauer even came to his defense.

Oberlander was finally forced to announce that he was going on an "extended vacation".

Yanina Altman sent the committee excerpts from her diary in which she described the activities of the Oberlander unit, came out against clearing his name and against continuing to pay a generous government salary to someone who was in fact a war criminal.

In addition, she also sent a letter to the prosecutor in Germany in view of the release from prison of Fritz Gabor, who was the commander of the Yanovsky camp.

She testified about the execution orders he gave, including the murder of babies, and about the many instances in which he murdered people with his own hands.

On the other hand, she also asked to see the German citizens who expressed opposition to the Nazi regime and even wrote a book about a group of German academics from Munich who acted against that regime.

The members of the group called themselves "The White Rose" and that was also the name of the book she wrote.

They all paid with their lives for their activities.

Just as she came out against the integration of Nazi government officials into the governance, academic and legal systems in West Germany after the war, she also wanted to show those who fought against evil and also wanted to highlight those who came out against de-Nazification and for humane values.

A page from the diary written by Yanina Hashels-Altman during the Holocaust (photo: official website, archive of the ghetto fighters)

The Altmans were active in the Israeli Communist Party and Vinina was also one of the founders of the "Women in Black" organization.

She was a peace activist, worked and advocated for the Israeli-Palestinian relationship.

For years she participated every Friday in the protest vigil held in Haifa.

In addition, she volunteered in the organization "Ko LeOved" and the democratic women's movement.

Over the years, plays about her life were presented: "Yanina", in Polish performed by a Lviv theater group, "Yanina's Notebooks" in French and the play "Yanina" staged by Belha Mas-Ashrov.

When writing the play, she asked Maas-Ashrov to "connect the play with the implications for today's reality".

She said that "We need to understand the suffering of others because we have suffered. My love is everywhere, wherever the stability of people's lives is undermined. My love is everywhere where people lose their loved ones."

Rahmilevich, who met with her many times, told how even in her old age she would come by bus from the Neve Shanan neighborhood in Haifa to the ghita warriors, bringing with her a new book she had written and a cake she had made.

"There was a modest woman who gave every person equal treatment," he said.

"It didn't matter at all to her what the status or title of the person she was talking to was. Everyone was treated with curiosity and kindness. It was important to her that the person believed in the values ​​of justice."

Last December her husband, Kalman Altman, passed away, and last month Yanina passed away, whose life from childhood to the end of her life was a continuous struggle.

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