11 Facts About Dora Diamant

From a Jewish family, Diamant was born in Pabianice, Poland on 4 March 1898, the daughter of Herschel Dymant, a successful small businessman and a devout follower of the Hasidic dynasty in Ger.

Dora Diamant ran away and went to Berlin, where she worked in the Berlin Jewish community as a teacher and seamstress in an orphanage.

Dora Diamant stayed with him, moving even to the sanatorium outside Vienna where he died in her arms on 3 June 1924.

Dora Diamant secretly kept an unknown number of Kafka's notebooks, which remained in her possession until they were stolen from her apartment, along with her other papers, in a 1933 Gestapo raid.

Dora Diamant had a "great triumph and her first rave review" in 1928 as the female lead, Princess Alma, in Frank Wedekind's King Nicolo, or Such is Life.

Dora Diamant gave birth to a daughter, Franziska Marianne Lask, named after Franz Kafka, on 1 March 1934.

Dora Diamant escaped Germany with her daughter in 1936, joining her husband in Soviet Russia.

Dora Diamant "worked as a dress designer and opened a restaurant".

Dora Diamant died of kidney failure at Plaistow Hospital in east London on 15 August 1952 and was buried in an unmarked grave in the United Synagogue Cemetery on Marlowe Road in East Ham.

In 1999, her relatives from Israel and Germany gathered at her gravesite for a stone setting, which reads "Who knows Dora Diamant, knows what love means".

Dora Diamant is played by actress Henriette Confurius in the 2024 Kafka biographical film Die Herrlichkeit des Lebens.