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The diary of a young boy

The sister of holocaust victim Petr Ginz, whose personal writings are newly translated into English, helps unlock a painful chapter in history

By Kimberly Ashton
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
May 16th, 2007 issue

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST
Chava Pressburger says her brother's diary speaks for the children murdered by the Nazis.
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When the Nazis took 14-year-old Petr Ginz from his parents’ Prague home in 1942, nobody in the family imagined it was the last time most of them would see him. His mother thought he would be sent to a work camp for a couple months and then returned home.
“We knew that we couldn’t trust [the Nazis], but we couldn’t imagine what was actually happening,” Petr’s sister, Chava Pressburger, said over a cup of tea at a Pařížská street cafe. “Even now, it’s hard to imagine what really happened.”
On a recent rainy afternoon, Pressburger, 77, visited the world of her youth: Her grandparents’ Jungmannovo náměstí house, the Karlín apartment her family called home and the Jáchymova street school she and her brother attended.
Pressburger, then known as Eva Ginz, was the only member of the family to ever see Petr after he was deported. They met two years later,
when she was sent to Terezín (Theresienstadt) concentration camp, just before Petr was sent to Auschwitz and gassed immediately upon arrival.
What has kept Petr’s memory alive among the souls of 80,000 Czech Jews killed in Nazi death camps is his diary, published in Czech in 2004. The English translation of The Diary of Petr Ginz debuted in the United States (Atlantic Monthly Press) in April, and will be published in the United Kingdom (Atlantic Books, Ltd.) this June.
COURTESY PHOTO
The Jungmannovo náměstí antique shop owned by Josef Ginz, Eva and Petr's grandfather. The building no longer exists.
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COURTESY PHOTO
Eva, at 4 years old, pictured with her brother, Petr, in 1934.
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COURTESY PHOTO
Eva, left, with her parents, Marie and Otto Ginz, and Petr in 1939.
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“I see Petr not only as my brother but as a symbol of the one and a half million Jewish children who were murdered,” Pressburger said.
The book chronicles his everyday life from September 1941 to August 1942, a month before he was sent to Terezín. After the war, Petr’s father, Otto Ginz, gave the diaries to a friend for safekeeping. Later, when the friend sold her Modřany apartment, the new tenant discovered the diaries. He contacted Yad Vashem, an organization dedicated to preserving the memory of the Holocaust, in Israel a few years ago.
The diaries combine mundane accounts of the weather and Petr’s daily plans with terse, factual descriptions of the slow deportation of the Prague Jewish community:
 
September 11, 1941
In the morning at school. The Maunters, who live on our floor, have to leave for Theresienstadt, together with thousands of other people. … Mr. Maunter went to the Community (Jewish) to ask if it wasn’t a mistake (he is over 50 years old and ill). In the later afternoon we went for a walk through town over the Charles Bridge …
March 11, 1942
In the morning I was in town; there is an announcement on the board in Politika in Wenceslas Square that Jews are not allowed to read newspapers.
The absence of panic in the diary is striking. Petr, and the people he mentions, go about their daily lives seemingly as normally as possible.
“It’s hard to grasp because it was so well organized, because the Germans were so organized. Everything went as prescribed, you know,” Pressburger said.
According to Pressburger, Nuremberg laws stated that Jews married to non-Jews were exempt from deportation, but the children of such marriages were to be sent to camps when they turned 14.
“They were waiting with horror [for] the day when I was 14,” Pressburger, whose father was Jewish and mother was not, said of her parents. Being two years younger than her brother, she met him at Terezín, when he was 16, after he had spent two years there.
She barely recognized him since he had lost so much weight and was so pale. His body wasn’t all that had changed.
“In Terezín he was like an adult, his views, his attitudes to things. He became very philosophical,” she said. He also believed he would be free after the war, and he wanted to be prepared. “Petr was trying to absorb as much knowledge as he could, I would say obsessively,” she said.
Petr would never get the chance to put that knowledge to use. In September 1944, four months after Chava’s arrival, he was sent to Auschwitz. She later learned from Auschwitz survivors that he was gassed to death when he got there.
As the war drew to an end, the Nazis amended their laws to hasten the genocide. Chava’s father, Otto Ginz, was sent to Terezín in February 1945, joining his daughter at the camp. In May, the prisoners heard shots.
“We were afraid the Germans were shooting Jews,” Pressburger said. They hid under their bunks. But then she heard cries of joy. “We went out carefully and we saw the Russians.”
Chava and her father made their way back to the Karlín home where her mother still lived. They whistled downstairs and she opened the window.
“She looked at us and her first question was ‘Where is Petr?’ ” Pressburger said.
Otto Ginz’s entire family, save himself and his daughter, had been murdered.
According to Michal Frankl of the Terezín Initiative, before the war 118,000 Jews lived in Bohemia and Moravia, and 28,000 of them lived in Prague. About 74,000 Jews were deported from the Czech lands to Terezín; 60,000 of those were later deported to the ghettoes and extermination camps “in the east,” he said.
Pressburger and her father were among the 7,000 people liberated at Terezín. Of those who were deported from Terezín to other camps, only 3,000 to 3,500 survived, Frankl said.
After the war, Pressburger emigrated to Israel, where she still lives with her husband and works as a painter.
“I didn’t want to stay where all my friends and my relatives on my father’s side were killed. It was too painful to remain here,” she said.
A few years ago she and her husband bought a flat in Vršovice, and they visit Prague a couple times a year to see surviving relatives. She came to town this month in part to attend a May 16 concert at Divadlo Minor in honor of her brother.
Pressburger’s parents also emigrated to Israel after the war, but the family rarely mentioned Petr.
“We weren’t able to speak about Petr anymore because even mentioning his name was so painful,” she said.

Kimberly Ashton can be reached at kashton@praguepost.com


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