On this day in ...... 1990 (20 years ago today), Dr. Lotta Hitschmanova (left) died in Ottawa, Canada, following a decade's suffering from Alzheimer's disease. She'd been born 80 years earlier in Czechoslovakia, and earned diplomas in French, English, German, Spanish, and Czech from Prague University, from which received her Ph.D. After studying at the Sorbonne in Paris she returned to work as a journalist. Her anti-Nazi dispatches drew attention; consequent self-exile throughout Western Europe left her penniless. Refused a U.S. visa, she worked as for the Censorship Department in Canada. (Her parents perished in Nazi death camps.) In the mid-1940s she embarked on a lifelong career as the founder of Canada's Unitarian Service Committee, raising contributions for wartorn Europe and, eventually, for developing countries throughout the world -- an effort that garnered her many awards. (photo credit) "Reporters and editors called her "The Atomic Mosquito", for her persistence in getting good media coverage."
(Prior August 2 posts are here, here, and here.)
