Helga's Diary
A Young Girl's Account of Life in a Concentration Camp
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
'The most moving Holocaust diary published since Anne Frank' Daily Telegraph
First they led us to the baths, where they took from us everything we still had. Quite literally there wasn't even a hair left. I didn't even recognize my own mother till I heard her voice . . .
In 1941, aged 12, Helga Weiss, her mother and father were forced to say goodbye to their home, their relatives and all that they knew, and were interned in the Nazi concentration camp of Terezín. For the next three years, Helga documented her experiences there, and those of her friends and family, in a diary. Then they were sent to Auschwitz, and the diary was left behind, hidden in a wall.
Helga was one of a tiny number of Jewish children from Prague to survive the holocaust. After she returned home, she eventually managed to retrieve her diary and completed the journal of her experiences. The result is one of the most vivid first-hand accounts of the Holocaust ever to have been recovered.
'Anne Frank's diary finished when her family was rounded up for the camps: in Helga's Diary, we have a child's record of life inside the extermination factories. Shines a light into the long black night that was the Holocaust' Daily Express
'Resounds with a ferocious will to endure conditions of astonishing cruelty. Displays a rare capacity to remain keenly observant and to find the right words for transmitting . . . memory into history' New Statesman
'A moving testimony to courage and endurance. Remarkable . . . what is so compelling is the immediacy and unknowingness' Financial Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Weiss begins her diary as a frightened eight-year-old in a bomb shelter, wondering what the Czechoslovakian government means by the declaration of "mobilization." The scene sets the tone of fear and confusion that will dominate her life for the next several years, the bulk of which she spends in the Jewish ghetto, Terez n. Her writings describe both the torturous physical circumstances of daily life, as well as the psychological toll wrought by ceaseless anxiety, degradation, and survivor's guilt. Although readers know Weiss will be among the approximately 1% of children who survive the camp, the section covering the eve of the war's end when the SS race around with Weiss's group of dying Jews in cattle cars to find an open extermination camp, but are blocked at every turn by advancing Allies is still a breathtaking account of the fate to which she had resigned herself. In a 2011 end-of-book interview, Weiss explains why it's worth reading another Holocaust account: "Because it's narrated in a half-childish way, it's accessible and expressive, and I think it will help people to understand those times." Indeed, an adolescent's take on such horrors accompanied by the adult Weiss's paintings is a chilling testament to the tragedy of the Holocaust. 16 color illus., photos, maps, and glossary.
