Helena Janeczek

Helena Janeczek is a German-born Italian novelist and journalist born in 1964 in Munich to a family of Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivors. She moved to Italy in 1983 and writes in Italian, her acquired language. Her work engages deeply with the history of the Holocaust, Jewish memory, and the experience of displaced identities. Janeczek published her debut novel Lezioni di tenebra (1997), a remarkable meditation on her family's relationship to the Holocaust. Her second novel Cibo (2002) and third novel Le rondini di Montecassino (2010) continued her exploration of war memory and collective identity across generations. La ragazza con la Leica (The Girl with the Leica), her 2018 Premio Strega winner, is a biographical novel about Gerda Taro, the German-Jewish photographer who was the companion of Robert Capa and who died covering the Spanish Civil War in 1937, becoming the first female photojournalist to die in combat. The novel reconstructs Taro's life through the memories of those who knew her. The novel was praised as a tour de force of biographical imagination, weaving together different voices and perspectives to recover a remarkable woman erased from history. Janeczek is one of Italy's most important voices for Holocaust memory and European Jewish heritage.