Helga's Diary

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 Terezin. For the next three years, Helga documented her experiences there, and those of her friends and family, in a diary. This book deals with this diary.

The most moving Holocaust diary published since Anne Frank

A moving testimony to the courage, endurance and painfully premature maturity of the young victims 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 dressmaker. Of the 15,000 children brought to Terezín and later deported to Auschwitz, only 100 survived the Holocaust. Helga was one of them. On her return to Prague she studied art and has become well known for her paintings. The drawings and paintings that Helga made during her time in Terezín, which accompany this diary, were published in 1998 in the book Draw What You See ( Zeichne, was Du siehst ). She has two children, three grandchildren and lives to this day in the flat where she was born.