Zhanna Arshanskaya Dawson

Zhanna Arshanskaya Dawson (born Janna Arshanskaya, April 1, 1927 – January 9, 2023) was a Russian-American pianist, Holocaust survivor and faculty member of the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University (Bloomington). Dawson came to national prominence in 2009 after her son, journalist Greg Dawson published a book, Hiding in the Spotlight, chronicling her escape from the Holocaust. A middle-grade book, Alias Anna: A True Story of Outwitting the Nazis, by Susan Hood with Greg Dawson was published in 2022.

Early life Janna Arshanskaya was born in Berdyansk, Ukraine on April 1, 1927. She was the daughter of Sara and Dmitri Arshansky, a Jewish candy maker and amateur violinist from Berdyansk, a town in southeastern Ukraine. Her father bought her a German piano and enrolled her in piano lessons at age five. At six years old she made her performance debut, playing J.S. Bach's Two-Part Invention No. 1 on the radio.

Holocaust In 1941, Dawson and her family were living in Kharkov when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union and began to strategically and brutally kill Jews. All the Jews in Kharkov who had not left, more than 16,000, were grouped together by the Nazis and sent on a long forced march to be killed and buried in the ravine Drobitsky Yar near Kharkov. A mile from the ravine, her father bribed one of the guards by giving him a gold watch, so that he would allow Zhanna to escape. Zhanna hid among the crowd that had gathered to watch. She was later reunited with her sister Frina at the home of the Bogancha family in Kharkov (Frina has to date never revealed how she too escaped). The two concealed their Jewish identity by inventing a cover story on how their parents were killed, calling themselves Anna and Marina Morozova. They made their way to an orphanage in Kremenchuk, Ukraine to get official papers to certify their aliases where a piano technician noticed their talent, and introduced them to a theater director who was in charge of entertaining the Nazis. Thereafter, the sisters performed piano for Germans (who never knew they were Jews) throughout the war. Though several people accused them of not being who they said they were they were never caught.

Frina married Kenwyn Boldt, who was also a pianist, and worked at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Revealing her story In 1978 Dawson's son Greg was writing a column about Holocaust, a television miniseries, and asked his mother what it was like living during the time of the war.