The School Girl Who Survived the Holocaust by Fooling the Nazis by Chloe Satterfield

The Impact Helga Had

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Her concentration camp diary was sold to publishers all around the world at the Frankfurt book fair. Her private journals were soon to be published the following year in the UK. Public interest in her written story has always been overshadowed by her success as a postwar painter. Weiss visited London for a concert at the Wigmore Hall commemorating fellow inmates at the Terezin camp in former Czechoslovakia. Helga's story was included in the 2019 film, "Anne Frank Parallel Stories." Helga shared her story, along with a few other Holocaust survivors, about her life in the camps. The movie portrays the struggles and similarities these survivors had. The Czech Center Museum Houston, Helga's story and her art is there.

Helga Weiss

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She is a survivor of the Holocaust. She clung to writing and art, which depicted everyday life in the camps. When she was going to Terezin, Helga took her clothes, two very small dolls, a pad, watercolors and crayons. Art was her way of communicating and processing her experiences and feelings in the camp. Helga’s dad, Otto Weiss, urged her to draw what she sees in a picture of children in the snow. It is what encouraged her love of art.

Background

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(Her diary began in 1939, which 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."). Helga Weiss, at the Auschwitz camp in 1944, she and her mother fooled a Nazi named Josef Megele which saved her life. When Helga was in her teens, she lied about her age, claiming she was old enough to work for her keep. Her mother persuaded the Nazis that Helga was her daughter’s older sister and she was sent to the forced labor barracks and not the gas chamber. The Weiss apartment was handed over to Germans and her family was transported to Terezin by rail. The city on the north-west perimeter of Prague had become a transit hub for Czech Jews which were out to work before being sent on to extermination camps. She loved school and soon fell in love for the first time at the camp she was at and spent time with both her parents before her dad was killed at Auschwitz

Resisting an Unforgettable Moment

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On October 4^th, 1944, Weiss and her mother were transported to Auschwitz where they faced Josef Mengele, who was directing children and older women towards the gas chambers and fit adults towards the forced labor camp. With the help of Helga’s subterfuge, she was one of only 150 to 1,500 children believed to have survived of the 15,000 sent to Terezin. She was transferred from Auschwitz to a labor camp in Flossenburg 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 at that camp for the rest of the war.

Picture of Helga Weiss

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Symbol: Books

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Terezin Camp

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Weiss's Family

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Helga Weiss Interview

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(use subtitles)

Drawing Helga's Dad Made Her Draw

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Heathens by Twenty One Pilots

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An Unforgettable Saying

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"My father told me that, whatever happens, we must remain human, so that we do not die like cattle. And I think that the will to create was an expression of the will to live, and survive, as human beings."

Start of the Holocaust in Her Eyes

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“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. 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.“