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To smuggle a loaf of bread — was to resist.
To teach in secret — was to resist.
To gather information and distribute an underground newsletter — was to resist.
To cry out warning and shatter illusions — was to resist.
To rescue a Torah scroll — was to resist.
To forge documents — was to resist.
To smuggle people across borders — was to resist.
To chronicle events and conceal the records — was to resist.
To extend a helping hand to those in need — was to resist.
To dare to speak out, at the risk of one's life  — was to resist.
To stand empty-handed against the killers — was to resist.
To reach the besieged, smuggling weapons and commands — was to resist.
To take up arms in streets, mountains and forests — was to resist.
To rebel in the death camps — was to resist.
To rise up in the ghettos, amid tumbling walls,
in the most desperate revolt humanity has ever known...

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Helga Weiss, age 14, born November 10, 1929 in Prague, Czechia. She was moved into death camp Auschwitz with her mother. They fooled the officer by saying she was of age and healthy to work. After escaping death at Auschwitz they were later moved to 3 other camps. At Helga's last camp it was nearing the end of the war and after surviving the Holocaust by fooling the officer, she is now an artist in Prague.

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'#AnneFrank. Parallel Stories' is a documentary that walks you through the lives of five Holocaust survivors. The five women braved the atrocities of the concentration camps they were deported to and now, they live to share their experiences in different shapes and forms. Among these is Helga Hošková-Weissová (also Helga Weiss) who was only 10 when she was sent to the Terezín ghetto. But now, after all these years, Helga shares her holocaust stories with the world through her scintillating art. The ones who have already watched the documentary might have a fair idea about Helga and her recent artistic endeavors. But for those who are curious about her current whereabouts and her history, here's everything you need to know.

Who is Helga Weiss?

On November 10, 1929, Helga Weiss was born in Prague-Libeň to a Jewish family. For the first ten years of her life, she was raised in Prague itself. But just one month after her 10th birthday, Helga and her parents were sent to Terezín, which back in the day, served as a prison and a nazi-ruled ghetto. Helga was among the reported 15,000 children who were deported to Terezín and was doomed in room number twenty-four of a so-called Girl's Home. While being held captive inside the walls of the camp, Helga found solace in her drawings which served as a testament to her experiences there. Her father had once told her "draw what you see" and that's exactly what she did during her stay at the camp.

After being deported to Auschwitz at the age of 15, Helga managed to survive by convincing the infamous German Schutzstaffel (SS) officer, Josef Mengele, that she's above the 18. As a result, instead of being gassed, she was permitted to work with others who were sorted out to be "good enough" for forced labor. Moreover, she also duped the officer into believing that her mother was much younger than her actual age, which saved her mother's life as well.

From Auschwitz to Freiberg, Helga was deported again, before finally being forced to join a 16-day death march to the camp at Mauthausen. In the end, at this camp, she was liberated on May 5, 2020. After the end of the Second World War, Helga went back to Prague and pursued a degree in Arts. She also landed the opportunity to learn under renowned Czech artist Emil Filla and later held several of her art exhibitions in Prague and many different parts of Europe.

Where is Helga Weiss Now?

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. (Featured Image Credits: David Vaughan | Radio Prague International)

As you can see in the image below, in 2018, Helga Weiss attended a workshop conducted by a Prague-based global education company:

It was truly an honor and life-changing experience for our SPU custom program students and CEA Prague staff to meet Helga Hoskova-Weissova, a survivor of the Terezín transit camp. Read her story: https://t.co/TFLKqAmgnz #ceaAbroad #studyabroad pic.twitter.com/hSXMrAtXRQ

- CEA Study Abroad (@CEAstudyabroad) September 24, 2018

Here's another picture posted by a twitter user who met her in March 2019:

On eve of Int. Women's Day I met Helga Hošková-Weissová, a Czech artist, and Holocaust survivor, known for her drawings and diary from Terezín concentration camp pic.twitter.com/ouNOxK2aQQ

- Daniel Meron (@AmbMeron) March 7, 2019

Just recently in January 2020, a blogger named Erin Faith Allen visited Helga's home and her art studio in Prague. Check it out below:

Helga Weiss, #survivor of four concentration camps #terezin #freiburg #auschwitz #mauthausen shows me her studio and art. Full article linked below. #Holocaust #remembrance https://t.co/wKV3xa5hWY pic.twitter.com/WOGLXILcG1

- Erin (@ErinFaithAllen) January 28, 2020

Read More: Best World War II Movies

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Helga Weiss Now 2020: Where is Holocaust Survivor Helga Weiss Today?

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'#AnneFrank. Parallel Stories' is a documentary that walks you through the lives of five Holocaust survivors. The five women braved the atrocities of the concentration camps they were deported to and now, they live to share their experiences in different shapes and forms. Among these is Helga Hošková-Weissová (also Helga Weiss) who was only 10 [...]

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After lying to escape death, she survived Auschwitz, but then had to go to other camps for more labor but she still survived there. She continued to draw and make art, she also has a diary for everything she went though at the camps. Her love for art still exists to this day.

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“all of us are crying silently, but we don't let our emotions show.”- Helga Weiss.

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Helga survived and is now an artist in Prague, she does artwork describing and showing the horrors of the Holocaust to try and show people waht she went through. Helga was one of 100 children to survive from the Terezin camp. Today she is and will always be known as a hero and a survivor.

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Helga Weiss escaped death at Auschwitz by lying to one of the most reviled men in modern history. She lied to him about her age and said she was fit to work. On an Auschwitz station platform in 1944, Helga,not long into her teens, and her mother fooled a German officer, Josef Mengele. After escaping death, she was then transferred to a labor camp at Flossenburg and there she escaped death a second time when she was forced to join a 16-day “death march” to the camp at Mauthausen. She stayed there until the end of the war.

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The Holocaust Resistors: Learn about the brave teens and young adults who took a stand and fought back!

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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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Cochrane, Kira. “Interview: My Dairy Of A Nazi Death Camp Childhood.”The Guardian, 22 February 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/feb/22/helga-weiss-diary-nazi-death-camp. Accessed 14 February 2022.

Lojo, Karlin. “Helga Weiss-How A Young Hero Survived Terror Through Art”. Czech Center, 15 August 2020, https://www.czechcenter.org/blog/2020/7/30/helga-weiss. Accessed 14 February 2022.

Sharma, Dhruv. “Where Is Helga Hošková-Weissová Today?”. The Cinemaholic, 1 July 2020, https://thecinemaholic.com/where-is-helga-hoskova-weissova-now/. Accessed 14 February 2022.

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What to do in Houston? Visit the Czech Center Museum Houston

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Through her diary and art, Helga Weiss tells her story of survival and coping through the Holocausts. After being transported to Terezín at age 14, Helga clung to writing and art, depicting everyday life in the camp. Today her diary and art are known by many and has reached millions.

In an interview with BBC TV Helga Weiss described how much they were allowed to bring to the camp. "We were allowed 50 kg of luggage, so we took just our clothes and something important to us. I took two very small dolls, a pad, watercolors and crayons," Her art became a way of communicating and processing her experiences and feelings in the camp.

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. The pictures show queues for food; a bleak, basic washroom; a girl ill with tuberculosis; people on stretchers; bread transported in a hearse marked "Welfare for the young". Helga did as her father told her and would later think of the snowman drawing as the first picture, she drew in Terezin, but also the last drawing of hers as a little girl.

Helga would later be sent to four camps, Terezin, Auschwitz, Freiberg, and Mauthausen. In the days leading up to her deportation to Auschwitz, she hid her drawings and poems from her father in the Terezin camp. Helga was one of 100 children to survive from the Terezin camp.

Today, Helga shares her diary and illustrations with the world. The atrocities of the Holocaust will forever be a part of her and in her art. Her diary has been published as well as two more books.

Recently Helga's story was included in the 2019 film Anne Frank Parallel Stories. Helga Weiss, Arianna Szörenyi, Sarah Lichtsztejn-Montard and sisters Andra and Tatiana Bucci share their stories side by side along with Anne Frank. These girls were all around the same age experiencing the Holocaust. The movie portrays their struggles and similarities. These women will go on to share their story and life with millions. Helga Weiss's story will continue through her writing and in her art.

At the Czech Center Museum Houston we are inspired by Helga Weiss and her art. The Creative Activism Project is the museums growing and interactive project. The project allows students to develop critical thinking skills by asking students the following questions: What does it mean to live through a traumatic event? How can we discuss sensitive topics? How can art be used to express empathy?

To answer the following questions, please research the history of the Terezin Concentration Camp and create a work of art based on what you've learned about the children in Terezin and what it means towards our times. Students are welcome to create an illustration representing how the information about Terezin had impacted their perspective on a historical event. In the fall of 2020, we will showcase the art in a special exhibit on Terezin in our museum.

You can share your artwork with us until August 31, 2020
For more information, email: Development@CzechCenter.org

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Helga Weiss - How a young Hero survived Terror through Art Czech Center Museum Houston - A place to celebrate our world's art, music, dance and diverse cultures - What to do in Houston? Visit the Czech Center Museum Houston The Czech Center Museum Houston is a meeting place for Czech and local culture, a place where artists and professionals, Czech and non-Czech alike, can celebrate art, culture and music.

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Through her diary and art, Helga Weiss tells her story of survival and coping through the Holocausts. After being transported to Terezín at age 14, Helga clung to writing and art, depicting everyday life in the camp. Today her diary and art are known by many and has reached millions.

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What Pushed Helga To Be Strong And To Resist?

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What Pushed Helga To Be Strong And To Resist?

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Helga's motivation was to help not only herself but to save her mother as well, Helga survived a total of 4 labor/death camps during the Holocaust just at the ages of 14. During the camps she held on to her love for art, she drew what she was going through and her coping mechanism was art and drawing.