The Diary Of Petr Ginz

Not since Anne Frank’s ‘The Diary of a Young Girl’ has such as intimately candid, deeply affecting account of a childhood compromised by Nazi tyranny come to light.

In 1941, Petr Ginz was a young teenager living in Prague with his parents and sister. Adventurous, artistic and optimistic, he wrote poems and novels and edited a children’s magazine inside the work camp at Theresinstadt. Originally written in his own special code-language, Petr’s diaries describe daily life for the Ginz family and document the introduction of anti-Jewish laws from a young adult’s point of view — pithy and unsentimental. The writing stopped when Petr was sent to Auschwitz in 1944 but his books survived in a Prague attic.

They recently came to light in extraordinary circumstances and were published in the Czech Republic in 2005 to a storm of publicity. Edited by his sister, Chava, and including background material and beautiful reproductions of Petr’s artwork, this book is a classic in the making.