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i choose Helga Weiss because at the time lots of people have died and also it was probably really hard for people to even survive.And so that interested me that  a 14 year old school girl  survived the Holocaust by fooling the Nazis. Because of that I wanted to learn more about how she fooled him and how she got away with it and so much more.So that's interested me for wanting to know more about her. That's why I chose Helga Weiss for my project.

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Helga was born in 1929 and grew up in Prague most of her life. In 1944 Helga Weiss was 14 years old. And was one of the only 100 children to survive out of the 15,000.In so she and her mother were sent to four camps.The first was Terezín, where they spent three years, sleeping two or three to a bed that was really too small for even one, with little to eat and to keep out the cold.Her and her mother only had one blanket to share for these 3 years .Helga was born in Prague and it has always been her home, apart from the four years she spent it the camps.

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"On October 1944, Weiss and her mother were also transported to Auschwitz, where they faced Mengele, who was directing children and older women towards the gas chambers and fit adults towards the forced labour camp. Thanks to her subterfuge, she was one of only 150 to 1,500 children believed to have survived of the 15,000 sent to   Terezín. She was then transferred from Auschwitz to a labour camp at Flossenbürg where she escaped death a second time when she was forced to join a 16-day "death march" to the camp at Mauthausen. She remained there until the end of the war. "I asked Helga whether it had felt wonderful to be liberated," said Butterfield. "She said, no, it was not that special because by that point she was so ill and had seen so many terrible things it was hard to feel anything."

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How did she survived the Holocaust by fooling the Nazis? 10

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How did she survived the Holocaust by fooling the Nazis? 10

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1944, Helga Weiss and her mother fooled one of the most reviled men in modern history, Josef Mengele, and managed to save their lives. Not long into her teens, Weiss lied about her age, claiming she was old enough to work for her keep. Her mother persuaded the Nazis under Mengele's command that Helga was in fact her daughter's older sister. And she was sent to the forced labour barracks and not the gas chamber

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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 Terezín 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 Terezín, 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.

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/16/schoolgirl-who-fooled-the-nazis

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On an Auschwitz station platform in 1944, Helga Weiss and her mother fooled one of the most reviled men in modern history, Josef Mengele, and managed to save their lives. Not long into her teens, Weiss lied about her age, claiming she was old enough to work for her keep. Her mother persuaded the Nazis under Mengele's command that Helga was in fact her daughter's older sister, and she was sent to the forced labour barracks and not the gas chamber.

The story is one of many recorded in a concentration camp diary that was sold to publishers around the world at the Frankfurt book fair. The private journals of Helga Weiss are to be published in the UK for the first time next year by Viking Press, while foreign rights have been snapped up by publishing houses across the world.

Weiss, an artist in her early 80s who lives in Prague and is also known by her married name of Weissova-Hoskova, mentioned her journal during occasional public appearances, but until now public interest in her written story has always been overshadowed by her success as a postwar painter. The British publisher Venetia Butterfield heard of the diary's existence last summer when Weiss visited London for a concert at the Wigmore Hall commemorating fellow inmates at the Terezín camp in former Czechoslovakia.

"I heard about the event and called someone in north London who knew Helga. They told me she was just about to get on a plane back to Prague, but that she was coming round for a coffee first," said Butterfield. "I raced up to see her and we talked for no more than 10 or 15 minutes. She is an amazing woman with a great, feisty attitude."

Butterfield, who also publishes Anne Frank's diary, asked to see a sample of the writing in one of Weiss's surviving exercise books. "We had an academic report done, and once it was clear what the diaries were I went to Prague to see her. Accounts of the past are often shaped by the knowledge of what was to happen next. What is so important about the diary is that it is Helga's reality. You are there with her. It is a very different thing from a memoir."

Before Weiss was sent to the Nazi-controlled ghetto of Terezín as a child, she witnessed the insidious progress of the Holocaust in Prague. "One thing after another was forbidden: employees lost their jobs, we were banned from the parks, swimming pools, sports clubs. I was banned from going to school when I was 10," Weiss told the Observer at the time of the London concert. "I was always asking my parents, 'What's happening?', and became angry at them if I thought they were trying to hide something, to protect me."

The Weiss apartment was handed over to Germans and the family were transported to Terezín by rail. Known as Theresienstadt in German, the city on the north-west perimeter of Prague had become a transit hub where Czech Jews were put to work before being sent on to extermination camps. Her diary, which begins in 1939, records noises that still haunt her; the "thunderous steps, the roar of the ghetto guards, the banging of doors and hysterical weeping always sound - and foretell - the same".

"She was obviously very clever and quite mature," said Butterfield. "She was obsessed with school at first, like any child of that age. Then there are terrible goodbyes as her friends begin to be taken off to Terezín. At each point Helga thinks the worst thing has happened to her so you see how people become used to bad things. Eventually, when the family are sent to the camp they take some cake and eat a little every day."

Butterfield points out that memories of Terezín are not all painful. Weiss grew up there, fell in love for the first time, and spent time with both her parents, before her father was killed at Auschwitz. "My father told me that, whatever happens, we must remain human, so that we do not die like cattle," Weiss has said. "And I think that the will to create was an expression of the will to live, and survive, as human beings."

On 4 October 1944, Weiss and her mother were also transported to Auschwitz, where they faced Mengele, who was directing children and older women towards the gas chambers and fit adults towards the forced labour camp. Thanks to her subterfuge, she was one of only 150 to 1,500 children believed to have survived of the 15,000 sent to Terezín.

She was then transferred from Auschwitz to a labour camp at Flossenbürg where she escaped death a second time when she was forced to join a 16-day "death march" to the camp at Mauthausen. She remained there until the end of the war. "I asked Helga whether it had felt wonderful to be liberated," said Butterfield. "She said, no, it was not that special because by that point she was so ill and had seen so many terrible things it was hard to feel anything."
Helga's Diary will be published by Viking on 7 June next year

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The schoolgirl who survived the Holocaust by fooling the Nazis

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Helga Weiss, now an artist in Prague, escaped death at Auschwitz by lying to Josef Mengele about her age and saying she was fit to work

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All of these things has affected her in lots of different ways. As in  like during the time she was at the camp there was  disease, starvation,  the lice and bed bugs that crawled across their faces. And also the bed they had to sleep  two or three a bed even though it was really too small for just one. With little to eat, And only had one blanket to share with her mother and made it really hard for her to sleep. And all of this had to keep on going on for three years

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Helga's art was greatly encouraged by her father Otto Weiss. After receiving a picture of children in snow, he urged his daughter to "draw what you see". Her art mirrored her diary as she began to illustrate everyday life in the camp. Her art would prove as a medium of understanding the would she was living in.  Her drawings depicted the horrors of Terezin like rations, disease, the lice and bed bugs

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Since her debut as a professional artist, Helga has won several accolades including an honorary Doctorate by the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. As of 2013, when she was 83, Helga was still living in the same Prague family home she was born in. In the same year, on April 22, 2013, she even published her own memoir titled “Helga’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Account of Life in a Concentration Camp” in which, as the title suggests, she recounts all of her experiences during the Holocaust.

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"The two women made their way back to Prague, and ultimately managed to get their apartment back. Tragically, Helga’s father Otto never came home. But Helga and her mother Irena were never able to find out the truth about what happened to him. Most of their other relatives and friends never returned from the camps either. Helga’s uncle survived, and after the war, he was able to recover her diary and paintings. Despite their grief, Helga and her mother knew they had to go on and build a new life for themselves."