Publication date: January 21st 2013
Genres: History, Memoir, Non-fiction
Helga Weiss is an eleven-year-old girl living in Prague in 1939. The words above are hers as are all the words in the book, Helga’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Account of Life in a Concentration Camp. Czechoslovakia has been invaded by the Nazis and in a few short months Helga has seen her carefree life change to one of rules and regulations. By 1941 she and her family are on their way to a concentration camp called Terezin, a camp in Czechoslovakia that given the fact that it was once a fortress town, gave the appearance of normalcy with a school, sleeping quarters, and a park. They are served meals with dessert and have bathrooms but this is as far as the Nazis go. Men and women sleep in separate dormitories and the camp is operated as a slave labor base used to populate German war effort forces in digging ditches and building roads.
For the next four years Helga lives here with her mother and the ability to see her father and other family members with some regularity. When the last of the original Aryan citizens vacate the town their houses are used and Helga moves into a dormitory for girls where she is able to create a circle of friends who study together, write plays and poetry and act as most thirteen-year-olds do. At the same time, she witnesses young men forced to dig their own graves before being hung and watches various extended family members loaded onto “transports” to other destinations. In September 1944 her father is conscripted for one of these transports. She will never see him again. Later that year, both she and her mother are put on a train that ends up in Auschwitz. By adding years to her age and subtracting from her mother’s they are able to stay out of the line for the gas chamber and to stay together but this is as far as their luck goes. Now there are no beds, their heads are shaved, there is no real food, and there are new sadistic routines such as standing for 6 hours in freezing rain, ostensibly for a roll call that never comes and moving to a new barracks every night.
We were always hungry; hope sustained us. We were no longer living off that quart of water and slice of bread; you can’t live off that. Now we live off the strength of our will. And we will survive! Someday, after all, the end must come.
After a month they are moved to a new camp, Freiberg, where they begin working twelve hour shifts in an airplane factory. With the approach of the Russians over 500 of them are loaded onto open coal cars and depart for German territory. After sixteen days, they arrive at Mauthausen, their final destination. On May 5, 1945 they are liberated and by May 21st Helga and her mother are back in Prague, where Helga lives to this day. Of 15,000 children in Terezin who were later deported to Auschwitz, Helga is one of 100 survivors.
Helga’s Diary is unique in that it one of the few pieces of written material to give a day-by-day account of life in a concentration camp as it was happening. At Terezin, Helga’s uncle worked in the records department and when she was shipped out he took her handwritten pages and drawings and hid them in a brick wall. He survived the war and returned later to find them and give them back to Helga, at which time she reconstructed the rest of her journey. Like any Holocaust memoir this is difficult reading but it is oddly counteracted by Helga’s indomitable will to see the best in her situation. At Terezin she decides that it doesn’t matter that they can’t go to the movies anymore, at least they have beds. No matter how bad it gets, she understand that it could be worse, an unusually mature attitude in one so young. At the same time the pathos of her situation and her joy over the barest of necessities were almost impossible for me to comprehend.
I have never been nor will I ever again be, so pleased with anything as I am this coat. I’m so beautifully warm in it; I’m so happy.
There are many works out there by Holocaust survivors and each deserves attention. Helga’s Diary feels like the continuation of The Diary of Anne Frank, in that both are young girls, looking to the future, eager, falling in love, full of all that makes teenage girls a marvel and a trial. Anne’s words are stopped when her family is discovered but Helga’s only begin when she is deported, making them a more complete portrait of a time that should never have happened. And while it is a very different world from the 1940s, the increase in religious intolerance and terrorism means that reminders of where fanaticism leads are worthwhile reading.