Anna Simoni – ein jüdisches Mädchen aus Leipzig erobert die British Library

The story of the bibliographer Anna E.C. Simoni with ELISABETH GUHR, Leipzig

Anna Elisabeth Charlotte Simoni was born in Gohlis in 1916, went to school in Connewitz, studied in Italy and, after fleeing in 1939, in Glasgow, Scotland. After the war, in which she was deployed as an airwoman in the Navy from 1943, she was employed at the British Library. As curator of the Dutch section (1950 - 1981), she built up the department for Dutch literature in the British Library in her work as a bibliographer, book historian and research librarian.

Her great love was for the books of the "Dutch Golden Age" and the "secret books", the underground press in the Netherlands during the National Socialist era. Anna Simoni died in Dorset in 2007. Despite her high level of recognition (in 1998 she was awarded the distinction 'Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion'; in 2000 she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Genoa), she is still hardly known in Germany.

Elisabeth Guhr, born in Mecklenburg in 1950, a qualified civil engineer, has been researching the women's rights activist Louise Otto-Peters and her Leipzig relatives on the basis of her own (genealogical) family history. She is interested in the history of Gohlis and especially in the fates of former Jewish neighbors, which she researches and wants to make visible through exhibitions, lectures and guided tours. || Admission: according to self-assessment