Judith Hemmendinger

Origins and early life

Judith Hemmendinger was born Judith Feist at Bad Homburg vor der Höhe in Germany on 2 October 1923, in an Orthodox Jewish family: her father Philippe Feist was an engineer from Frankfurt, her mother held a doctorate in zoology from Heidelberg.

Work and career

The family fled to France in 1933, and during the war she worked in the religious farm school at Taluyers, in the network of the Éclaireurs israélites, the Jewish scouts who hid and fed children in the unoccupied zone; her father died at Gurs. In 1945, at twenty-two, she was sent to the children's homes at Écouis and then Taverny that received the boys brought out of Buchenwald, some four hundred adolescents who had survived the camps alone and whom the specialists of the day had written off as unreachable.

She stayed with them, directing the Taverny home, and treated them not as patients but as people with a future; Elie Wiesel and Israel Meir Lau were among them.

Personal life

She settled in Jerusalem in 1970, and in 1981 defended at Strasbourg a doctoral thesis, with the highest distinction, that followed those same men through their adult lives and showed how many had rebuilt families and work — the first serious study of what became of the child survivors. She published The Children of Buchenwald and a memoir, and died on 24 March 2024, at a hundred.