Chava Rosenfarb

(1923 - 2011)

In 1939 Chava Rosenfarb and her family were interned in the Lodz ghetto—by 1944 the last remaining one in Poland—before being deported to Auschwitz. Rosenfarb was on the verge of dying of typhus when the camp was liberated in 1945. She lived as a displaced person until 1949 in Brussels, where she began working on her novel The Tree of Life, and moved to Canada in 1950. “When I consider where I live now, and where I have lived,” she said in 2004, “I cannot believe that I am the same person.”