Zhanna Arshanskaya Dawson

[1][2] A middle-grade book, Alias Anna: A True Story of Outwitting the Nazis, by Susan Hood with Greg Dawson was published in 2022.

[3][4] She was the daughter of Sara and Dmitri Arshansky, a Jewish candy maker and amateur violinist from Berdyansk, a town in southeastern Ukraine.

Both sisters were offered scholarships at the Moscow State Conservatory, St. Petersburg Conservatory and Kharkiv National University of Arts where they studied under Regina Horowitz, sister of famed pianist Vladimir Horowitz[6] 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.

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.

There, an American camp administrator, US Army Lt. Laurence Dawson heard the girls perform in a variety act[5] He got them aboard the first ship of Holocaust survivors after the war.

Through connections he was able to obtain an audition before Ernest Hutcheson, Rosalyn Tureck, and Muriel Kerr of the Juilliard School of Music, which offered them scholarships to attend.

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.