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An extremely rare and important publishing event: the diary of a Jewish girl who lived through the Holocaust

In 1939 when she begins her diary, Helga is eleven years old. Alongside her father and mother and the roughly 40,000 Jews who lived in Prague at the time, she endures the first wave of the Nazi invasion and racist brutality: her father is denied work, schools are closed to her, she and her parents are eventually confined to their flat. Gradually, as the Nazis’ full intentions unfold, deportations begin and her friends and family start to disappear.

In 1941, Helga and her parents are sent to the concentration camp of Terezin, where they live for three years, and then, in 1944, Helga’s father is sent to Ausxhwitz. Helga and her mother choose to follow him there, not realizing what lies in wait for them. Helga’s uncle bricks her diary into a wall to preserve it. At Ausxhwitz, Helga’s father is murdered, but miraculously Helga and her mother survive the camp, the many transports and journeys of the last days of the war, and manage ultimately to return to Prague. As Helga writes down her experiences since Terezin, completing the diary, she is fifteen and a half. Barely a single Jew remains in the city.

Written in pencil in school exercise books and translated here for the first time, Helga’s diary is a strikingly immediate and exceptionally important first-hand account of the Holocaust.

Helga Weiss was born in Prague in 1929. Her father Otto was employed in the state bank in Prague and her mother Irena was a seamstress. Of the 15,000 children brought to Terezin and later deported to Auschwitz, only 100 survived the Holocaust. Helga was one of them. After the war, Helga studied athe Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and became an artist. In 1954 she married the musician Jiri Hosek. She has two children, three grandchildren and lives to this day in the flat where she was born.