Halina Borel

Halina Borel (1927–2019) was born in Złoczów, a small town in south-eastern Poland (now Ukraine). As a Jewish teenager, she lived through the Nazi occupation of Poland, surviving pogroms, the Złoczów ghetto, a labor camp, and years in hiding under a false identity in Lwów — experiences she later chronicled in her memoir The Garden of Shadows.

After the war, she emigrated from Poland in 1948, eventually settling in Geneva, Switzerland, where she graduated from the Faculty of Medicine in 1957. She subsequently moved to the United States, where she pursued a distinguished career as a medical researcher at some of America's most prestigious institutions, including Harvard, Tufts, and NYU. She returned to Geneva in 1990, where she spent her final years.

The Garden of Shadows, her only non-scientific publication, was first published in 2007 by Éditions Slatkine in Geneva, and is available on Amazon. It stands as a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the extraordinary capacity for compassion that exists even in the darkest of times.