Frida Scheps Weinstein (born November 1934) is a French author. Her book A Hidden Childhood: A Jewish Girl's Sanctuary in a French Convent was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
Scheps Weinstein was born in 1934 to immigrant Jewish-Russian parents in Paris, but was teased for looking German.[1] By the age of six, she was sent away to live in the care of the Red Cross at the Château de Beaujeu, a convent school.[2] As she grew up safe from The Holocaust, Scheps Weinstein began to forget her Jewish background and asked to become baptized as a Catholic. That never happened as her mother objected. .[3] Upon the conclusion of the war, she reconciled with her father in Jerusalem, where she received her education and enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces.[4]
Once Scheps Weinstein completed her army service in 1960, she moved to the United States and worked for Agence France-Presse.[4] While in America, she published a memoir of her memories from The Holocaust, written in French and published by Balland,titled #J'habitais rue des Jardins Saint-Paul". Rights were bought in America by Hill and Wang, translated by Barbara Loeb Kennedy, and published as A Hidden Childhood: A Jewish Girl's Sanctuary in a French Convent 1942-1945";it then was a nominated finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.[5]