Irène Némirovsky

Writer

Born

February 11, 1903 · Kiev, Russian Empire [now Ukraine]

Died

August 17, 1942

She was born in 1903 into a Ukrainian Jewish family, and emigrated to Paris as a young woman. She wrote nine books between 1929 and 1937, one of which was made into a movie ("David Golder", 1930). She became well-known in France, but did not become a French citizen. She converted to Catholicism in 1939, but could not escape the rise of anti-Semitism. After the Nazis invaded France, she was arrested in 1942 as "a stateless person of Jewish descent" and deported to Auschwitz, where she and her husband both died.