Helga's Diary

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Helga's Diary offers a young girl's poignant first-hand account of life in a concentration camp during World War II. Beginning in 1938, eight-year-old Helga witnesses the rise of Nazi brutality in Prague, where her father loses his job, schools close, and her family is confined to their flat. As the situation worsens, deportations commence, and friends and family begin to vanish. In 1941, Helga and her parents are sent to Terezin, where they endure three years of hardship. In 1944, her father is deported to Auschwitz, and Helga and her mother choose to follow him, unaware of the horrors that await. Helga's uncle hides her diary in a wall to preserve it. At Auschwitz, her father is murdered, but Helga and her mother miraculously survive the camp and the chaos of the war's end, eventually returning to Prague. By the time she completes her diary at fifteen and a half, she is one of the few Jews left in the city. Written in pencil in school exercise books and translated for the first time, Helga's account is a vital testimony to the Holocaust. Born in Prague in 1929, Helga was one of only 100 children to survive the Holocaust out of 15,000 taken to Terezin. After the war, she became an accomplished artist, and her works from Terezin were published in 1998. Helga married musician Jiri Hosek in 1954 and still resides in her childhood home.