ENGLISH CORNER, CON LINDA JIMÉNEZ – This week’s trivia question: What do the diaries of Anne Frank and Eva Heyman have in common?
Eva Heyman was born in Oradea, a city with a large Jewish population, located on the border between Romania and Hungary, on February 13, 1931. She was a small child when her parents divorced and she went to live with her maternal grandparents. Eva was very aware of the political situation in Europe and the progress of the German army as it advanced and occupied Hungary in the first months of 1944. On her thirteenth birthday, Eva began to write a diary, describing her life and that of her family, as well as daily life in Oradea, which became increasingly difficult as the Germans approached and then occupied the town. The diary covers the last four months of Eva’s life in Oradea, including the moving of the family to the ghetto, and ends on May 30, a few days before she was deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered in October of that year.
Her diary was rescued and published in 1947, with an English edition in 1988. The book was recentlypublished in Spanish with a prologue by Elvira Lindo.
Ms. Lindo is a Spanish journalist and writer. Her first book, Manolito Gafotas (“Manolito Four-Eyes”) was the first in a series of books about the ten-year-old son of a trucker growing up in a working-class neighborhood of Madrid. The books have become classics of children’s literature and Lindo won the National Award for Children’s and Youth Literature in 1998 for one of them.
She has also written adult novels, plays and screenplays, and has a weekly column in El País, Spain’s leading newspaper. Lindo spoke with us about Eva Heyman and her diary.
