Given name: Janina Family name: Lakutowicz

  • YES
  • Female
  • Janina
  • Lakutowicz

  • Anita Orzech's carer. Helped to arrange rail passes for activists trying to free Emanuel Ringelblum from the camp in Trawniki. She usually went to Trawniki every two weeks and brought parts of the camp diary, photographs, letters, various materials and documents. She transported them baked in bread. She also learnt to do that with parcels from the Council for Aid to Jews. After the camp in Trawniki was closed down she tried to look for flats, but to no avail. She exchanged dollars for RPZ (Council for Aid to Jews) several times.

  • around the author

  • From Basia Bermanowa's description - 'A woman about 45 years old, of excellent presence, fine-figured, stylish, however not very elegantly dressed, of solid and somewhat stern appearance.'

  • The author started to write on 5 January 1944, and the last entry is dated 14 January 1945. The diary was written in ten, common, chequered school notebooks. Written irregularly. Bermanowa probably took a pen in her hand only when she either found the time or when she felt strong enough. Successive entries, dated scrupulously, written in Polish, were written in occupied Warsaw ('in hiding'), then in occupied ('free') capital and in a number of places near Warsaw (again 'on the Aryan papers'). The first event described took place during the Polish-German War of 1939, the latest - three days before the liberation of Warsaw (17 January 1945).

  • 43-45