The Diary of Petr Ginz

Not since Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl has such an intimately candid, deeply affecting account of a childhood compromised by Nazi tyranny come to light. As a fourteen-year-old Jewish boy living in Prague in the early 1940s, Petr Ginz dutifully kept a diary that captured the increasingly precarious texture of daily life. Petr was killed in a gas chamber at Auschwitz at the age of sixteen, and his diaries--recently discovered in a Prague attic under extraordinary circumstances--now read as the prescient eyewitness account of a meticulous observer. Petr was a young prodigy--a budding artist and writer whose paintings, drawings, and writings reflect his insatiable appetite for learning and experience. He records the grim facts of his everyday life with a child's keen eye for the absurd and the tragic--when Jews are forced to identify themselves with the yellow star of David, he writes, On the way to school I counted sixty-nine 'sheriffs' --and throughout, his youthful sense of mischief never dims. In the space of a few pages, Petr muses on the prank he plays on his science class, and reveals that his cousins have been called to turn over all their furniture and belongings, having been summoned east in the next transport. The diary ends with Petr's own summons to Theresienstadt, where he would become the driving force behind the secret newspaper Vedem (We Lead), and where he would continue to draw, paint, write, and read, furiously educating himself for a future he would never see. Fortunately, Petr's voice lives on in his diary, as fresh, startling, and significant as Irene Nemirovsky's recently recovered Suite Francaise. The Diary of Petr Ginz is an invaluable historicaldocument and a testament to one remarkable child's insuppressible hunger for life. In 2003, before setting out on the ill-fated Columbia space shuttle, Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon sought to commemorate the Holocaust by taking aboard the ship the painting of a moonscape by Petr Ginz, a Prague teenager who died in Auschwitz. After the shuttle's tragic explosion on February 1, 2003--what would have been Ginz's seventy-fifth birthday--news reports of the teenage prodigy and his painting reached Prague, where a man made a startling discovery: he was in possession of Ginz's wartime diary, which had been hidden away in his attic for decades. Soon thereafter, the diary made its way to Petr's sister, who lived in Israel, and she saw to its publication throughout Europe, where the diary has become an international sensation.