Frida Scheps Weinstein

Frida Scheps Weinstein was born in Paris, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants to France. Just before the start of World War II, her father went to the British Mandate of Palestine to make arrangements for them to move there; Frida and her mother were trapped in Paris by the war and the Nazi Occupation. They went on the run until Frida's mother sent her to a Roman Catholic boarding school for safety. Even at age six, she understood that it was vital for her to conceal her Jewish origins, but then and later she experienced feelings of isolation, shame, guilt, abandonment, and identity confusion. Her mother was arrested near the Swiss border, deported to Germany, and died in Bergen-Belsen. Frida survived the war and was reunited with her father in Jerusalem in 1947. In 1961, she moved to the USA, working for Agence-France Presse and settling in New York. Her memoir A Hidden Childhood: A Jewish Girl's Sanctuary in a French Convent, 1941-1945 was published in 1985 and was short-listed for a Pulitzer Prize.