Hana Levi was born to a Jewish family in Sarajevo in 1913. She studied in Belgrade in the 1930s. She was captured by German occupying forces in 1944 and spent half a year in a Gestapo prison before being taken to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in Germany, where starvation and disease resulted in mass deaths. Her diary From Belsen: 1944–1945, which documents her time in Bergen-Belsen, was first published in English in 1982. It was first published in the original language by the Sarajevo-based publishing house Buybook in 2024. Hana Levi died in Jerusalem, aged 88.