Books about Terezin from Amazon.com

Ela Stein was eleven years old in February of 1942 when she was sent to the Terezin concentration camp with other Czech Jews. By the time she was liberated in 1945, she was fifteen Somehow during those horrendous three-and-a-half years of sickness, terror, separation from loved ones, and loss, Ela managed to grow up. Although conditions were wretched, Ela forged lifelong friendships with other girls from Room 28 of her barracks. Adults working with the children tried their best to keep up the youngest prisoners' spirits. A children's opera called Brundibar was even performed, and Ela was chosen to play the pivotal role of the cat. Yet amidst all of this, the feared transports to death camps and death itself were a part of daily life. Full of sorrow, yet persistent in its belief that humans can triumph over evil; this unusual memoir tells the story of an unimaginable coming of age..
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Bauhaus trained, she taught art to children in a concentration camp..
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The drawings and poems by the children of Terezin are among the most poignant documents of the Holocaust This expanded edition of the unforgettable collection I Never Saw Another Butterfly was occasioned by the loan of the children's art by the State Jewish Museum in Prague to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., for exhibition and for this book.

The ghetto of Terezin (Theresienstadt), located in the hills outside Prague, was an unusual concentration camp in that it was created to cover up the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Billed as the "Fuhrer's gift to the Jews," this "model ghetto" was the site of a Red Cross inspection visit in 1944 and of a propaganda film produced by the Nazis. Some elderly Jews even paid to enter its protective ghetto walls. With its high proportion of artists and intellectuals, culture flourished in the ghetto -- alongside starvation, disease, and constant dread of the continuous transports to the death camps of the east. Every one of its inhabitants was condemned in advance to die.

A total of 15,000 children under the age of fifteen passed through the Terezin Concentration Camp between the years 1942 and 1944; less than 100 survived. In these poems and pictures drawn by the young inmates of Terezin, we see the daily misery of these uprooted children, as well as their courage and optimism, their hopes and fears.

The drawings and poems are all that is left of these children. About those who signed their names to their work, it has been possible to find out a few facts: the year and place of their birth, the date of their transport to Terezin and to Auschwitz, and the date of their death. For most of them that last date was 1944, a year before the end of the war.

These innocent and honest depictions allow us to see through the eyes of the children what life was like in the ghetto. Birds and butterflies flutter with the looming red roofs of Terezin in the background; a luminous moonlit room betrays the stark interior of the barracks. Pencil line drawings depict the threatening guards, work brigades, and deportations they witnessed. Side by side with the realities are images of hope -- a sailboat guided by a candle, a lighted menorah, children playing in a garden that resembles Eden, figures scaling mountain peaks to liberation.

The children's poems and drawings, revealing a maturity beyond their years, are haunting reminders of what no child should ever have to see. Each piece of art gives the overwhelming tragedy of genocide a human and individual face.

This new, expanded edition of I Never Saw Another Butterfly includes many additional drawings and poems chosen from the archives of the State Jewish Museum in Prague by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum..
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Of all the documents of the Holocaust, this cookbook compiled from memory by the female prisoners at Terezin, a way station to Auschwitz, may be the most remarkable The Terezin prisoners recalled and wrote down their recipes for chocolate torte, breast of goose, plum strudel, and other traditional dishes not because they thought they might ever need them--they were surviving on scraps and potato peels at the time--but as a testament to the future, so that their grandchildren might receive a fragment of their inheritance. The manuscript found its way in 1969 to Anny Stern, the daughter of Mina Pachter, whose poems on barracks life are also included..
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Norbert Troller's unique account of life in Theresienstadt combines his intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the camp with two dozen of his own drawings and watercolors Troller recounts his two years in Theresienstadt from early 1942 until September 1944, when he was deported to Auschwitz after the Nazis discovered he and other artists were smuggling out drawings that revealed the horrors of Hitler's "model" ghetto. Miraculously preserved by his friends, Troller's drawings and watercolors of life inside Theresienstadt add a compelling dimension to his story. His keen observations of human nature, of the experiences of his fellow prisoners, and of his own existence are embedded within a powerful history of the Theresienstadt atrocities..
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Jana Renée Friesová was fifteen when she was imprisoned by the Nazis in the Czech ghetto town of Terezín (Theresienstadt). Her memoir unfolds before us the poignantly familiar picture of a young girl who, even under the most abominable circumstances, engages in intense adolescent friendships, worries with her companions over her looks, and falls in love. Raised a Catholic by secular Jewish parents, she did not even know she was a Jew until the German occupation of her country in 1939 when she was twelve.

Whereas Anne Frank's diary ends with deportation to a concentration camp, Fortress of My Youth is the story of another young girl who tells us how she and her family were taken to Terezín, what food she ate there, what work she did, how her friends died from disease, how thousands were sent from there to Auschwitz, how her family members were killed, and how she escaped the gas chamber. But she also tells of love, joy, and sacrifice: musicians, writers, and intellectuals among the inmates who were determined to pass on their cultural heritage to the youth in Terezín; a network of Czechs outside the walls who smuggled in food; her singing in performances of Smetana and Verdi, the most profound experiences of her life..
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