Helga Weiss tricked Nazis by Laura Short

laurashort1 — 2025-03-07 18:31:35 UTC

laurashort1 — 2025-03-07 18:39:16 UTC

Helga telling her life story

laurashort1 — 2025-03-07 18:39:59 UTC

Helga as a young girl

laurashort1 — 2025-03-07 18:45:11 UTC

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.world.

laurashort1 — 2025-03-07 18:47:03 UTC

" we were together and it was a great help" - Helga Weiss

laurashort1 — 2025-03-07 18:51:06 UTC

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.

laurashort1 — 2025-03-07 18:53:37 UTC

"We had only one blanket." - Helga Weiss

laurashort1 — 2025-03-07 18:54:39 UTC

laurashort1 — 2025-03-07 18:56:05 UTC

" May readers treat this diary charitably and accept it for what it is " - Helga Weiss

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQ_xoLwy4Ko&t=174s

laurashort1 — 2025-03-07 19:00:31 UTC

laurashort1 — 2025-03-07 19:08:52 UTC

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

laurashort1 — 2025-03-07 19:10:05 UTC

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.

laurashort1 — 2025-03-07 19:11:27 UTC

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,"

laurashort1 — 2025-03-07 19:13:05 UTC

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

laurashort1 — 2025-03-10 17:32:52 UTC

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.

laurashort1 — 2025-03-10 17:34:02 UTC

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."