Ilsa Lieblich Losa was born in a small town near Hanover, Germany in 1913 and raised by her observant Jewish grandparents. With the rise of Hitler’s Nazi regime she managed to escape to Portugal because of her Aryan looks, an event described in the famous book, “The world I live in”.
Losa married a Portuguese architect, Armenio Losa, and eventually took Portuguese nationality. Her work includes romances, chronicles but especially children’s books.
Diverse career
Her most famous book is “The world I lived in”, in which she describes her youth in Weimar Germany and the rise of the Nazism and Gestapo persecutions. One of the famous passages is about the Sabbath service at a synagogue she used to visit with her grandparents.
Even today, the book is on reading lists in schools across Portugal and is about to be reprinted in its 26th edition. Losa also wrote for television during the 1970s and 1980s.
Another gift she left for the Portuguese literature was the translation of famous German authors into Portuguese.
In 1984 she received the Gulbenkian Prize for the children’s literature and in 1998 the Great Chronicle Prize from the Portuguese Authors’ Association.
Great loss
Agustina Bessa-Luis, a leading Portuguese author, describes Losa as “a big friend and a woman full of life”.
“Our friendship began when I published my first book,” she said, “and she is still present in my life.”
The president of the Portuguese Authors’ Association, Jose Manuel Mendes, said: “Ilse Losa was one of the most prominent personalities in Portuguese children’s literature. (Her books) clearly describe her childhood and teenage years under the Nazi regime.”
Another Portuguese author, Helder Pacheco, said Losa’s death was “a great loss for Porto culture and the Portuguese literature”.
“She was a noble woman,” said Pacheco, who was her neighbor and who always admired her capacity to adapt to a foreign city. “Her Portuguese writing was better than that of some Portuguese native authors,” he added.
Her last book, “Under strange skies” tells of the life of Josef Berger, a Jewish refugee in Porto who is trying to adapt to life in the city. In a way this book reflects the process Losa herself went through when she left Germany.
Losa was buried in a Porto cemetery. Her death is a great loss to Portuguese literature.
Article published with permission from the European Jewish Press ,a pan-European news agency based in Belgium