Her parents, Irene and Otto Weiss loved her very much and would always be by her side. Otto Weiss was a talented and aspiring musician but was also a soldier during World War l. He sustained arm and hand injuries and went to work with a bank. He then married his wife Irena, and then Helga was born on 1929. As described by a modern Helga Weiss, those were the happiest years of her life. Otto would inspire Helga musically, she had no talent for it but her gift was art. She still has one of her very early sketch pads that show the subjects she chose as a kid. As the war was getting heated up, Helga began to write a diary in words and pictures. The first pages show the rise of Nazi threats: air raid alarms, arrests, Jewish people losing their jobs, Jewish children getting expelled from schools, and more threats by the Nazis. Helga says because of a political situation, she had to remain an only child as her father wanted.

In December 1941, soon after Helga's 12th birthday, the authorities came for her family. They were sent to Terezin, a city up North of Prague that was known by its German name, Theresienstadt. Many of Helga's aunts and uncles were sent ther too. The camp in Terezin was essentially a vast camp used as a transit hub for thousands of Jews to be sent to Auschwitz and Treblinka. During her years imprisoned, Helga and her mother would fool the Nazis by lying about her age so she would work on labour barracks and by playing the most angrily insulting men in history, Josef Mengele.

• October 4th, 1944 - The day Helga and her mother Irena were sent to Auschwitz.

• December 1941 - The month Helga and her family were captured by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp in Terezin.

• Terezin - A town located in Czechia that is up north Prague.

Important Facts

• Josef Mengele, the guy that Helga played around in order to escape, was directing children and older women towards gas chambers and adults to forced labour barracks.

• When Helga escaped death a second time when she was forced to join a death march in the camp at Mauthausen, she was transferred to another death camp at Flossenburg

• Helga Weiss is one of the only 100 children to survive Auschwitz out of the 15,000 children that were sent there from the camp at Terezin.

• Several years later after surviving the Holocaust, Helga started her career as an artist where most of her portraits represent what she was going through during the Holocaust.