Jana Renee Friesova (1927–2016)

Jana Renée Friesová was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, the only child of an assimilated Jewish family. She had a comfortable childhood, dividing her time between the spacious home of her parents in Josefov, and that of her grandparents in Mnichovo Hradiště. She was a baptized and practicing Roman Catholic and did not even consider herself a Jew until the German Occupation of her country in World War II, which began when she was only 12 years old. She was 15 in 1942 when she and her family were deported by the Nazis to the concentration camp at Terezín (Theresienstadt). Her father Richard Fries and her grandmother were sent on to Auschwitz, where they were killed, but she and her mother managed to stay in Terezin and survived. After the war, she resumed her education, studied journalism, and received a PhD degree from Charles University. She taught philosophy and aesthetics at the university until her retirement in 1979. She also translated works by Nikos Kazantzakis and Judy Blume into Czech. Her memoir, Fortress of My Youth (Pevnost mého mládí) was published in 1996.