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jella lepman was the founder of the International Youth Library in 1946 and the International Board on Books for Young People in 1953.
Born in Stuttgart in 1891, she was the second of three daughters of a Jewish factory owner. She organized an international reading room for children when she was only seventeen. Her husband died when her two children were tiny, leaving her a widow at thirty-one. She became a journalist and in 1928 published her first children's book. When Hitler came to power, she lost her post in the German Democratic Party. She leftGermany to escape the Nazi regime in 1933, chose to return in the aftermath of the Second World War as Adviser on the Cultural and Educational Needs of Women and Children. She soon decided that what Germany's war-ravaged children needed was to see a world of the imagination, beyond their landscape of bombed-out buildings and military vehicles. Battling bureaucracy and enlisting the support of people such as Eleanor Roosevelt, she founded the International Youth Library in Munich, filling a huge void in the lives of Germany's children with...
