Author:
Helga Weiss
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Learn moreThe unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Helga's Diary: A Young Girl's Account of Life in a Concentration Camp, by Helga Weiss. Read by the actress Emily Bevan.
In 1938, when her diary begins, Helga is eight years old. Alongside her father and mother and the 45,000 Jews who live in Prague, she endures the Nazi invasion and regime: her father is denied work, schools are closed to her, she and her parents are confined to their flat. Then deportations begin, and her friends and family start to disappear.
In 1941, Helga and her parents are sent to the concentration camp of Terezรญn, where they live for three years. Here Helga documents their daily life - the harsh conditions, disease and suffering, as well as moments of friendship, creativity and hope - until, in 1944, they are sent to Auschwitz. Helga leaves her diary behind with her uncle, who bricks it into a wall to preserve it.
Helga's father is never heard of again, but miraculously Helga and her mother survive the horrors of Auschwitz, the gruelling transports of the last days of the war, and manage to return to Prague. As Helga writes down her experiences since Terezรญn, completing the diary, she is fifteen and a half. She is one of only a tiny number of Czech Jews who have survived.
Reconstructed from her original notebooks, which were later retrieved from Terezรญn, and from the loose-leaf pages on which Helga wrote after the war, the diary is presented here in its entirety. As such, Helga's Diary is one of the most vivid and comprehensive testimonies written during the Holocaust ever to have been recovered.
Helga Weiss was born in Prague in 1929. Her father Otto was employed in the state bank in Prague and her mother Irena was a dressmaker. Of the 15,000 children brought to Terezรญn and later deported to Auschwitz, only 100 survived the Holocaust. Helga was one of them. On her return to Prague she studied art and has become well known for her paintings. The drawings and paintings that Helga made during her time in Terezรญn, which accompany this diary, were published in 1998 in the book Draw What You See (Zeichne, was Du siehst). She has two children, three grandchildren and lives to this day in the flat where she was born.
Audiobook details
Narrator:
Emily Bevan
ISBN:
9780241966617
Length:
5 hours 13 minutes
Language:
English
Publisher:
Penguin Books Ltd
Publication date:
February 14, 2013
Edition:
Unabridged