by Helga Weiss
First published 2013
Helga Weiss starts writing in her diary as an eleven-year-old Jewish girl in Prague in 1939. The Nazis have invaded, and she watches them target her friends, neighbors, and family with increasing brutality. She records what she sees with remarkable clarity for someone so young. In 1941, authorities deport Helga and her parents to Terezin concentration camp. She keeps writing about her daily existence there, filling school exercise books with her observations. When officials prepare to send her to Auschwitz in 1944, her uncle hides her diary and drawings inside a brick wall. He works in the camp's records department and knows the papers might be lost forever otherwise. After the war ends, her uncle retrieves the hidden diary and returns it to Helga. She survives Auschwitz as one of only 100 children out of 15,000 who were transported there from Terezin. Her diary provides an immediate firsthand record of these experiences, written as they happened rather than reconstructed from memory years later.
Genres: holocaust, historical-fiction, 20th-century, biography-memoir
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: coming-of-age, survival
Setting: Prague, Terezin, Auschwitz
Period: 1939, 1941, 1944
208 pages · Hardcover · W. W. Norton
Content warnings: death, violence