Hava – Against All Odds
A Deaf Person's Story

by Eva Fielding-Jackson

This new autobiography promises to be most unusual and interesting. It is that comparative rarity – a memoir written by a member of the Deaf community, offering an insight into a world and culture that is relatively inaccessible to most people. Furthermore it is a story of survival and triumph aganst all odds, set against the background of the Holocaust.

Very direct, open and uncompromising in its frank depiction of her extraordinary and often sensational life, Hava tells her story as it is, in her own unique and personal style.

Hava was born to two profoundly-deaf Holocaust survivors. Her father miraculously survived seven different concentration camps, among them Auschwitz and Buchenwald. He remained in Bergen Belsen after his liberation until 1947, simply because he was Deaf and did not know the War was over. Later he met her mother in Budapest. Considering the near decimation of the Jewish population of Hungary by the Nazis, for them to have met each other as people who were Jewish, Deaf, single and Hungarian was a virtual miracle.

Growing up as Jewish people in post-War communist Hungary was not easy for her parents. After the 1956 Hungarian uprising, the family made their way to Israel, where a new culture and a new language added to Hava’s difficulties. She was only diagnosed as Deaf when she was 14, and as a consequence Hava had become branded as a problem child. One of her teachers subsequently told her that he had expected her to end up as a whore.

But, against all odds, she prevailed and through sheer strength of character and will-power made a new life for herself. She came to Britain, married her profoundly Deaf husband, and gained a postgraduate degree. She became a widely-known and respected member of the Deaf community in her capacity as a youth worker specialising in helping disabled young people. She is also a trustee for the British Deaf Association.

Her upbringing and the harrowing story of her parents' survival have made her deeply committed to Holocaust awareness teaching which she undertakes all over the world. This is her remarkable and inspiring story.