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Helga Weiss in the Prague apartment she has lived in since she was born, apart from the years she was imprisoned by the Nazis in concentration camps.

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When her and her mother were liberated May 5, 1945, they returned home to Prague and began to look for Otto, not realizing he hadn't made it through the Holocaust. 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 writing in her diary, filling in her times at the camps after Terezin; she writes it in present tense because she was still caught up in the experience, she says.

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

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Otto Weiss, her father, 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, who was a dressmaker, and in 1929 Helga was born.

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'The first picture I made in Terezin. I smuggled it to my father in the men's barracks and he wrote back: 'Draw what you see!' -Helga Weiss 

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Helga has loved art ever since she was a young child. 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. As war loomed, the eight-year-old Helga began to keep a diary in words and pictures. Even when she was sent to Terezin, she continued drawing. 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."

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"all of us—are crying silently, but we don't let our emotions show."

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Terezin: She was here for 3 years (December 1941 to October 1944). Helga describes in her book, the fear, the uncertainty, the desperation that daily beset the prisoners. They worried constantly about being included in the frequent transports that carried people to God knows what fate.

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Helga Weiss three days before her family was deported in December 1941.

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Helga's Diary: A Young Girl's Account of Life at a Concentration Camp 

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Helga's Diary: A Young Girl's Account of Life at a Concentration Camp 

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Helga kept the diary during the years at Terezin (1941-1944), beginning when she was 11 years old. When she knew that she and her mother had been selected for one of the dreaded transports, she gave the diary and drawings and paintings she had done to her uncle, who was assigned to work in the finance office at Terezin. He hid the materials by bricking them up in a wall, and he recovered them after the war.

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Helga Weiss was born in Prague in 1929. In her earlier years, she had a happy childhood. Her father encouraged her musically, but her real love was for art. As war loomed, the eight-year-old Helga began to keep a diary in words and pictures. In December 1941, soon after Helga's 12th birthday, the authorities came for the family. They were sent to Terezin.

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Helga and Irena's Use of Deception Saved Their Lives

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Helga and Irena's Use of Deception Saved Their Lives

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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."

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Helga's Diary: A Young Girl's Account of Life in a Concentration Camp

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Helga's Diary: A Young Girl's Account of Life in a Concentration Camp

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Helga continued to write with astonishing insight about her daily life in Terezin.

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After Helga came home she was put back into high school. When she graduated, she was admitted to the Studio of Monumental Painting under the supervision of Prof. Emil Filla, whose personality and style of work made a deep impression on her. After Filla’s death, Helga continued her studies under Alois Fišárek and graduated in 1955. Helga painted views of old Libeň, portraits and landscapes, and occasionally recalled her wartime experiences; in 1958, she illustrated Arnošt Lustig’s first book Night and Hope.

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Auschwitz: She was here for 10 days after Terezin. Helga states that her 10 days in Auschwitz were worse than her 3 years at Terezin. 10 days of hell.

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The Dormitory in the Barracks at Terezin, 1942. 'There are 21 of us in quite a small room. Mum and I have 1.20 square metres.'Illustration: Helga Weiss

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In the early 1960s she began to come to terms with the wartime persecution through art. In a series of large and expressive paintings, entitled Calvary, she conveyed her experiences of the ghetto, the death camps and the death transport. These are dark, almost monochrome paintings, rendered in a sharp and vigorous style, full of expression and dramatic tension. They were exhibited in Prague and Domažlice (1963), Rome, Naples and Venice (1964), Demmin and Greifswald (1965).

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Freiburg: She was here October 1944-April 1945. This was an auxiliary camp of Flossenburg, to work in an aircraft factory. The conditions there were somewhat better, despite the cold, continual hunger and slave work. The only solace were the frequent air-raids, the crowds of refugees and the constant thunder of artillery from the approaching front.

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Mauthausen: This journey started mid-April, 1945. They traveled to Mauthausen in open coal wagons, almost without food and water. The journey lasted sixteen days. On the verge of complete exhaustion, they were liberated by the U.S. army in the gypsy camp on 5 May 1945.

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Continuing Her Diary When She Returned Home:

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Continuing Her Diary When She Returned Home:

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When Helga and Irena had  returned to their native Prague, Helga recorded, writing in the present tense, her recollections of their experiences after they left Terezin. We learn in this diary, which has been translated from the original Czech text, that a young girl had to learn not only to survive but to connive and barter in the camp.

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During The Time She Was Finishing Her Diary:

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During The Time She Was Finishing Her Diary:

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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. The war had even affected her children. Her daughter can't bare to hear anything ugly, and her son is "terribly anxious".

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Family Separation: 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, her first boyfriend, in the second. They left from Terezin.

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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."

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Helga Weiss and her father, Otto, in 1930.

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Helga Weiss-Hoskova at home in Prague in front of one of her pieces of art