Dora Diamant (Dwojra Diament, also Dymant) (c. 1900 – 1952)[1][a][b] is best remembered as the lover of the writer Franz Kafka and the person who kept some of his last writings in her possession until they were confiscated by the Gestapo in 1933.
From a Jewish family, Diamant was born in Pabianice, Poland on 4 March 1898 (sources differ on her year of birth), the daughter of Herschel Dymant,[3]: 16 a successful small businessman and a devout follower of the Hasidic dynasty in Ger.
[3]: 17 At the end of World War I, after helping to raise her ten siblings, Dora refused to marry and was sent to Kraków to study to be a kindergarten teacher.
In July 1923, she was a volunteer at a camp "organized and run by the Berlin Jewish People's Home"[3]: 3 at Graal-Müritz on the Baltic Sea, when she met Franz Kafka, who was 40 years old and suffering from tuberculosis.
After Lask was arrested in March 1938 and sent to "a labor camp on the Kolyma River on the Arctic Circle in far eastern Siberia"[3]: 209 during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, Dora left the Soviet Union, traveling across Europe, reaching safety in England one week before Germany invaded Poland in 1939.
[3]: 344 Diamant is played by actress Henriette Confurius in the 2024 Kafka biographical film Die Herrlichkeit des Lebens (The Glory of Life).