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Helga weiss was a survivor from the Holocaust. She was born in 1929 in Czech republic. She survived the Holocaust when she was 14 years old, and she suffered a heck of a lot.

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Names of people involved in the Holocaust

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Names of people involved in the Holocaust

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Adolf hitler, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Friedrich Paulus, Erich Von Manstien Sir Aurthur Harris, Charles de Gaulle, Erwin Rommel, Etc were part of the Holocaust and World War 2.

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After the Holocaust after left tons of refugees, and many Jews that had lost many of their family members, and often had to deal with persistent antisemetism in their country.

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Helga Weiss collects butterflies. Her tiny flat is filled with them - china models, wooden carvings and in the stained glass of her window.

She loves butterfly jewellery and wears a brooch on her left breast, where the Nazis once made her display the Star of David.

Smiling Helga explains: "Butterflies mean freedom. There were none in the camps - no creatures but lice and bedbugs.

"There was nothing for them to eat, we scraped the crumbs from the ground. No flowers grew there. So the butterfly means a lot to the few who came back."

In the Second World War 15,000 children were transported from their homes in Prague, in what was then Czechoslovakia, to the Terezin concentration camp, almost 40 miles away.

Only 100, including Helga, came back. At 84, the great-gran is one of just 20 still alive.

She was imprisoned in four death camps, including Auschwitz, and endured starvation, illness and the constant threat of death in Hitler's gas chambers.

But she also kept a journal of her four-year nightmare, illustrated with her own graphic drawings.

And more than 70 years on, Helga's Diary has just been published - a vivid testimony of the Holocaust.

The wartime diary of Jewish schoolgirl Anne Frank, who like Helga was born in 1929 and had a father called Otto, has sold more than 25 million copies.

While Anne's account ended before she was sent to the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany at 15, Helga's takes readers with her inside the gates of hell.

She tells me: "I am one of the lucky ones. Luck or fate, or a miracle meant I stayed with my mother Irena the whole time and we survived.

"A few of my friends survived, but their families did not. Yes, I am very fortunate."

But fortunate is not a word that springs to mind as you read Helga's story.

Her bank clerk father Otto perished - probably in the gas chambers. She also lost her Uncle Jindra and first boyfriend, Ota.

She began her diary aged eight, recording the persecution of Jews in Prague and eventually the Nazis' invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939.

The new book cover uses a photo of Helga at 12, three days before her family were sent to Terezin in December 1941.

She says: "My father took me to have the photo taken for my grandmother, who was being left behind.

"The look in my eyes shows my fear and confusion, but it was so much worse than I could ever have imagined."

Arriving at Terezin, a ghetto used as a transit hub for Jews being sent to Auschwitz and Treblinka in Poland, Helga lived in a children's barracks.

Although conditions were harsh the youngsters organised dances and birthday parties - making cakes out of potato scraps.

Encouraged by her father to "draw what you see" Helga began recording life in the camp - the washroom, food queues and bread being carried on hearses marked "Welfare for the young".

One drawing marked the birthday of her friend Francka, showing them as babies in 1929, in a shared Terezin bunk in 1943, and in 1957, as mums.

But Francka died in Auschwitz aged 14. Helga, who became an artist after the war, went on to have three children with late husband Jiri.

After three years in Terezin Helga's father was sent with 5,000 men "to build a new ghetto". It is thought they went to Auschwitz.

Days later Helga and Irena arrived there themselves to be told they were at an "extermination camp".

She shrugs: "We saw smoking chimneys so we thought it was a factory. But other prisoners said it was the crematorium, for bodies.

"Some joked, 'Tomorrow the soot on your nose will be mine'. A guard told us, 'this is an extermination camp'. So you know you are going to die.

"Somehow Mum and I stayed together. We had to strip and our heads were shaved, 500 of us in a room.

"Mum went first and I was looking for her but I didn't recognise her. The SS guards thought it was very funny."

Death was never far away in the camp and young Helga learned to accept it, bargaining with God to let her die before her mother.

One day at Auschwitz some children being taken to the gas chambers fled into Helga's barracks to hide.

The teenager could hear the guards' hobnail boots heading towards the hut and froze in terror.

She wrote in her diary: "They're coming! They saw the children running to us! They'll shoot all of us. It's the end!"

She says: "I hugged Mum and started to pray, 'God, if I must die, let Mum and me die together. Don't leave me alone here.

"Although I don't want to die - let Mum and me survive'."

And they did. From Auschwitz they were sent to Freiberg in Germany as slave labour.

Then in April 1945 they were moved by rail to Mauthausen in Austria. It took 16 days - so long the camp was out of killer gas.

There was no food and Helga's mum nearly starved but on May 5, the camp was liberated.

Helga and Irena returned to Prague and gradually built a life.

They went back to their old flat, where Helga still lives and Irena survived until she was 84 - but never smiled again.

Helga is still in touch with the few remaining survivors. She says: "We are over 80 and mostly widows.

"We visit each other and stay in touch by email and Skype.

"We still get invited to visit schools to talk about ourselves. It's not a pleasure - it can wreck you physically and psychologically.

"When I talk, I relive it and it's still just as vivid. But it's my duty to warn the new generations, 'This could happen again'.

"I can only tell them what I have learned - the value of life, that people have to be kind to each other.

"Many survivors are haunted by dreams of the gas chambers even now. When I was in the camp my dreams were in black and white and grey, because life had no colour.

"But one day I had a vivid dream I was in a meadow. The grass was green the sky was blue, there were flowers and butterflies.

"The next day we were liberated. There was peace. And freedom."
* To order your copy of Helga's Diary: A Young Girl's Account of Life in a Concentration Camp RRP £16.99 at the special offer price of £13.49 with free P&P, please call the Mirror Bookshop on 0871 803 6772

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"It was so much worse than I could ever have imagined'': Nazi camp survivor's moving diary

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Helga Weiss collects butterflies. Her tiny flat is filled with them - china models, wooden carvings and in the stained glass of her window. She loves butterfly jewellery and wears a brooch on her left breast, where the Nazis once made her display the Star of David. Smiling Helga explains: "Butterflies mean freedom.

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In 1944, Helga Weiss came to terms with the idea of dying - with one important condition. She was only 14 years old and had never been strongly religious, but as she waited in a queue at Auschwitz she prayed she wouldn't die after her mother. She couldn't face being left alone.

Helga is one of only 100 children to survive Auschwitz out of the 15,000 sent there from the concentration camp at Terezín, north of Prague. Altogether, between 1941 and 1945, she and her mother were sent to four camps: Terezín, Auschwitz, Freiberg and Mauthausen.

The first was Terezín, where they spent three years, sleeping two or three to a bed that was really too small for one, with little to eat and to keep out the cold. But sharing with her mother made the impossible bearable. "We had only one blanket," says Helga. "But we covered ourselves with our coats. We were together and it was a great help."

She closes her eyes, and folds her arms tightly about herself.

We are in Helga Weiss's living room on the fourth floor of an apartment building in Prague. At 83, she still climbs the steep stairs each day and is a lively, friendly presence, surrounded by family photographs and paintings produced during her career as an artist. Her late husband, Jírí Hošek, was a musician who played double bass with the Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra, and her son, Jírí, is a cellist, as is her granddaughter Dominika.

Helga was born in this flat and it has always been her home, apart from the four years she spent in Nazi concentration camps. It was ransacked and occupied during the war but there are echoes of life as it was before the war. The piano in the corner, for instance, sits where her father's once did.

Helga with her parents, Irena and Otto, and her paternal grandmother, Sophie

Otto Weiss was a talented aspiring musician but as a soldier in the First World War, he sustained hand and arm injuries and went on to work in a bank. He married his wife, Irena, and in 1929 Helga was born. Those early years were happy. Otto encouraged his daughter musically, but she had no obvious talent for it; her gift was for art. She still has one of her very early sketch pads, which shows she chose subjects "perhaps other children don't. I always painted what I saw - a man in a meat store," for instance.

Helga's first day at school, 1936.

As war loomed, the eight-year-old Helga began to keep a diary in words and pictures. The first pages record the growing Nazi threat: air raid alarms, arrests, the expulsion of Jewish children from state schools, adults - including her father - losing their jobs, yellow Stars of David had to be sewn on clothes, and the constant, claustrophobic talk of "transports". It was because of the political situation, says Helga, that she remained an only child - a decision her father made.

In December 1941, soon after Helga's 12th birthday, the authorities came for the family. They were sent to Terezín, a walled 18th-century garrison town, also known during the war by its German name, Theresienstadt. Many of Helga's uncles and aunts were sent there too. Terezín was essentially a vast camp used as a transit hub for tens of thousands of Jews sent to Auschwitz and Treblinka.

Helga and her mother had no idea what lay ahead. They thought the war would soon be over. "We were allowed 50kg of luggage so we took just our clothes and something important to us. I took two very small dolls, a pad, watercolours and crayons," she says.

At Terezín, Otto was sent to the men's barracks and Helga stayed with her mother. Later, a Kinderheim - children's home - was set up and though she was frightened to leave Irena, Helga moved into a room with girls of her own age. Conditions were slightly better there and the group, "tried to stay human beings and be young," she says. They organised dances and celebrated birthdays and religious holidays - they once made a potato gateau as a treat, from food scraps they had managed to save.

One of Helga's happier sketches shows the girls gathering round a food parcel, jostling to see the contents. But the first drawing she made is a jolly picture of two children building a snowman - she smuggled it through to her father who sent back a crucial message: "Draw what you see."

She took his advice and began to record life in the camps. The pictures show queues for food; a bleak, basic washroom; a girl ill with tuberculosis; the crowded waiting room in the emergency clinic; people on stretchers; bread transported in a hearse marked "Welfare for the young".

Another drawing marks the birthday of her friend, Francka. The girls had been born in the same maternity ward, and the sketch shows them as babies in 1929, in their shared bunk bed in 1943, and in 1957, wheeling prams together. The last drawing is accompanied by a note to say that Francka died in Auschwitz before her 15th birthday.

Despite the horrors and strictures of Terezín - starvation rations, disease, the lice and bed bugs that crawled across their faces - there was a thriving cultural life. Many musicians had smuggled in instruments and one sketch shows families gathered around a violin trio giving a concert in a dormitory.

At Terezín, Helga met her first boyfriend, Ota, an orphan and chemistry student. He was in his mid-20s, she was not yet 15. "It was a half-childish love," she says. "We walked together and held hands ... and I remember the exact place in Terezin where we first kissed." She beams. "But nothing more happened than kissing."

In September 1944, the Germans announced that 5,000 men would be sent to build a new ghetto. Helga's Uncle Jindra would be in the first group, her father and Ota in the second. Helga describes the day her father left in her diary, the corners of his mouth twitching as he tried to smile, hands shaking as he held her. Then he was gone.

Three days later, she and Irena left. Just in time, she got her diary and a novel and some poetry by her father to her Uncle Josef, who worked in the records department at the camp. He bricked them into a wall to hide them.

Helga and her mother were sent to Auschwitz, where they joined the notorious queue as they arrived: older women and mothers with young children to the left, those deemed able to work to the right. To survive, it was essential to end up on the right. Prisoners who knew the fate that lay ahead on the left whispered warnings: "Don't say you are too young, don't say you are ill - say you are able to work. Don't say you belong together, that you are mother and child," remembers Helga."

She resolved to say she was older than 14; her mother would pretend to be younger. In fact, the SS man didn't ask questions and sent them both to the right. "He pointed - I don't know if it was luck, fate, a miracle. I have friends who are still alive - they are the same age as I am - but their mothers were [sent to the left]. So I was lucky twice. Not only that I was not sent, but that I was together with my mother."

Next day, at roll call, the women were addressed in German. "The speech was very long - I asked my mother to translate. She said, 'Oh, he says we are in an extermination camp.'"

Helga laughs explosively, a sound still full of shock and incredulity. They hadn't known about the gas chambers, the death camps. "We arrived and saw smoking chimneys - we thought it was a factory."

Other prisoners enlightened them - the smoke was rising from the camp crematorium. They were told to strip naked and their heads were shaved. Helga didn't recognise her own mother until she heard her voice.

Her 10 days at Auschwitz were worse than the three years at Terezín, but Helga suspects it was harder still for her mother. She remembers being outside, shaved head freezing, and Irena reaching over to cup her bare scalp. It was all the comfort she could offer.

From Auschwitz, they were sent to Freiberg, a subcamp of Flossenbürg concentration camp, where they worked as slave labour for five months, polishing aeroplane parts. Then came a 16-day transport by rail to Mauthausen in Austria. Irena was so weak she could hardly stand and both suffered from frostbite, lice and constant, raging thirst. Rumours flew about the war's end and some women escaped, but Helga couldn't be sure her mother was fit enough to try. In one four-day period they had nothing to eat but two potatoes, half a cup of tea and two spoons of sugar.

Along the route, news arrived that Berlin had fallen.

At Mauthausen,they went without food for five days. Had there been just one more day before peace was declared, Helga suspects her mother would not have survived. Days later, on 5 May 1945, the camp was liberated by the Allied forces.

Helga Weiss and her father, Otto, in 1930. She last saw him in Terezin, in 1944, when he left with 5,000 others, destination unknown. But she remembered his words: 'Draw what you see!'

She and Irena returned home to Prague and began to look for Otto. His name didn't appear on the registration lists for any of the camps other than Terezín. In the first months, they found it unbearable to be alone together in the flat, which was so full of memories of their life together before the war. In the evenings they walked the streets together until it was time to sleep.

Helga continued her Terezín diary, recording everything that happened after they moved on. It's written in the present tense because she was still caught up in the experience, she says.

The diary has been published as she wrote it in the 1940s, as it was found at the bottom of a drawer. The sheaf of yellow papers was given to Venetia Butterfield, a British publisher who heard about it in 2010 when Helga came to London for a concert to commemorate Terezín.

In the prologue of the book, Helga explains that although "the writing is childish, the style prolix, naive," she felt editorial changes would have affected the authenticity of the story. "May readers treat this diary charitably and accept it for what it is," she writes; an important record of life in the concentration camps, which adds to the memories of other child diarists, including, of course, Anne Frank.

Irena didn't want Otto to be declared dead but after a year the certificates were sent out, regardless. Helga believes someone may have known what happened to him, but didn't want to tell them. Some stories just weren't passed on. Her Uncle Jindra, for example, was sent from Auschwitz to Mauthausen and experienced such cold that his legs had to be amputated. He died as a result. His wife knew he had died and where, but was never told those details.

There was no question of Helga and her mother living apart after the war. Irena remained single and when Helga married, her husband shared the apartment with them. Irena helped with her son and daughter, and lived until she was 84. Last year, Helga's daughter remarked that Irena had never smiled. "I never thought about it, but maybe she didn't. Maybe she had no reason."

The legacy of the war has affected her children, she says. Her daughter can't bear to hear of anything ugly, and her son is "terribly anxious," she says. "When I am alone, I have to contact him twice a day."

But one of her granddaughters has been exploring her Jewish roots and it is probably this younger generation that will benefit initially from Helga's extraordinary journal of survival.

With her forthright attitude, and pride in her family, Helga's concern is, as always, for the future, and how people survive. There is only one moment during our interview when she wells up with emotion, but they are tears of happiness. Just last week, she says, her great-granddaughter got her first tooth.
Helga's Diary: A Young Girl's Account of Life in a Concentration Camp, by Helga Weiss, is published by Viking, £16.99. To order a copy for £13.59 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846

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Helga Weiss was sent to four Nazi concentration camps, along with her mother. Like Anne Frank, she kept a diary. Only now has it been published. Kira Cochrane meets her

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6Ol3eprKiw

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Sia - Never Give Up (from the Lion Soundtrack) [Lyric Video]

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This is a representative sampling of photographs from World War II that can be found in the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration. For more information on materials from World War II visit our World War II Records page.

Many images and other records can be located online in our National Archives Catalog.

For additional select images of WWII, see:

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This is a representative sampling of photographs from World War II that can be found in the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration. For more information on materials from World War II visit our World War II Records page. Many images and other records can be located online in our National Archives Catalog.

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“Together we read Čapek's First Team, R.U.R., The Mother,† and Hugo's Les Misérables.” “all of us—are crying silently, but we don't let our emotions show.”

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The Prague Uprising stands as a seminal moment in Czechoslovak history. Over 30,000 Czech civilians and resistance members took the streets, constructing 2,049 barricades in an attempt to liberate and protect their city.

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Helga Weiss, a Czech Jewish girl, was sent with her parents to the concentration camp at Terezin, a few days after her 12th birthday in 1941. She kept a diary, in words and pictures, and when she and her mother were sent on to Auschwitz in 1944, her uncle hid the diary in a brick wall for safekeeping. These are some of the pictures from her diary, which has only now been published

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My Nazi death camp childhood diary - in pictures

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Helga Weiss, a Czech Jewish girl, was sent with her parents to the concentration camp at Terezin, a few days after her 12th birthday in 1941. She kept a diary, in words and pictures, and when she and her mother were sent on to Auschwitz in 1944, her uncle hid the diary in a brick wall for safekeeping.

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Weiss literally fooled the nazis and it was crazy to think that a kid would be able to do this. Then after all off the mess, their was a diary that was about Helga was a sucess in the Holocaust.

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"HELGA'S DIARY: A Young Girl's Account of Life in a Concentration Camp," by Helga Weiss, translated by Neil Bermel, W.W. Norton and Company, $24.95, 256 pages (nf)
"Helga's Diary: A Young Girl's Account of Life in a Concentration Camp" by Helga Weiss is an inspiring account of life in a concentration camp during World War II.

Echoing the message of "The Diary of Anne Frank," "Helga's Diary" is a moving account of the strength of the human spirit and its fierce will to live.

"Helga's Diary" begins by talking about life in Prague before the war. Helga describes a happy childhood that was filled with family and friends.

In 1939, the first wave of Nazis entered Prague. As a result, Helga was denied an education, her father was not allowed to work and all Jews had to wear a yellow star.

Eventually, Helga and her family were sent to a concentration camp in Terezin. In vivid detail, Helga describes the regular executions, the living quarters and the limited amount of food.

In 1944, Helga and her parents were sent to Auschwitz. Before she left, Helga's uncle was able to hide her records in a brick wall in the records department of Terezin. After the war, her records were recovered.

"Helga's Diary" is a provocative book that reminds readers of the astonishing cruelty of Nazi Germany. Weiss provides startling details about concentration camps, her captors and life after the war.

The most moving part of the book is in the beginning. As a child, Weiss describes what it meant to be a Jew in Prague and to wait for the "summons" to report to a Jewish concentration camp. Weiss explains the relationship she had with a young girl named Eva, and how it broke her heart when she realized she would never see her again.

Weiss also emphasizes how important and valuable it was to have an education. She describes her childhood love for learning and how unbearable it was to stop her education at the camps. Her participation in a secret school demonstrates how far she was willing to go to receive an education.

A heartbreaking part in the book is when Weiss describes her separation from her father. To this day, Weiss does not know what happened to her father, and can only speculate that he died in Auschwitz.

"Helga's Diary" is supplemented with black and white photos of the Weiss family. It also has photographs of various camps and Nazi soldiers.

Because of the violent nature of the Holocaust, there are references to and some descriptions of Jewish executions in the concentration camps.

"Helga's Diary" is an important and valuable book.

Shelby Scoffield has a bachelor's in English from Brigham Young University and a master's in rhetoric and composition from Stanislaus State University. She is currently working on her teaching credentials so she can teach high school English.

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Book review: 'Helga's Diary' is a provocative book about a young girl in WWII (+video)

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" HELGA'S DIARY: A Young Girl's Account of Life in a Concentration Camp ," by Helga Weiss, translated by Neil Bermel, W.W. Norton and Company, $24.95, 256 pages (nf) "Helga's Diary: A Young Girl's Account of Life in a Concentration Camp" by Helga Weiss is an inspiring account of life in a concentration camp during World War II.