Helga's Diary

February 25, 2013
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, Terezín. 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.

March 1, 2013
A young Prague girl's diary, amended after the events, chronicles her yearning for a normal life before deportation to Terezin and Auschwitz. Covering the fraught period between Czechoslovakia's mobilization for war in late 1938, when the author turned 9, to May 1945, when Weiss and her mother finally returned to Prague after the capitulation of the prison camp Mauthausen, where they were last transported, this diary offers a poignant look at the tense, precarious fate of the Jews under Nazi occupation. Weiss lived with her mother and father in a middle-class flat in Prague when the Germans invaded her homeland and anti-Jewish laws were put into place, gradually restricting every aspect of their lives. The author's school was closed down, forcing her to be home-schooled at private apartments, and her unemployed father took over the cooking and cleaning. In December 1941, Weiss and her parents were deported to Terezin, confined to the bleak, disease-ridden barracks, and under constant threat of more transports east. In October 1944, Weiss' father was sent to a labor camp, never to be seen again, while the author and her mother were sent briefly to Auschwitz, then to work in an airplane factory in Freiberg. Lying about her age, she was able to stay with her mother, and they managed to survive the cold, disease and hunger. Before transport, the diary and drawings were given to her uncle at Terezin, who worked in the records department and bricked the documents in the walls of the barracks. After the war, she subsequently edited and added the sections on the concentration camps, all carefully documented here. Weiss' moving eyewitness portrait adds a deepening to the understanding of the Jews' plight during this horrific period in history.

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March 15, 2013
As the number of Holocaust survivors dwindles dramatically, the potency of firsthand accounts increases with each passing year. Weiss' adolescent diary begins in Prague in 1938 with the Nazi occupation and ends shortly before her deportation from the Terezin concentration camp to Auschwitz in September 1944. Preserved by her uncle, who bricked it into a barracks wall at Terezin, her diary was completed after the war by her recording of later experiences at the Auschwitz, Freiberg, and Mauthausen camps. Illustrated with family photographs and her own paintings and drawings, Helga's Diary serves as a remarkable testament to her horrific journey and the ultimate resiliency of youth. Since so few of the approximately 15,000 children interred in Terezin survived, Helga's Diary, like the collective reminiscences in Hannelore Brenner's The Girls of Room 28 (2009), must speak for all the young voices that were prematurely stifled.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)