Story of a Teenage Holocaust Survivor

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. Altogether, between 1941 and 1945, she and her mother were sent to four camps: Terezín, Auschwitz, Freiberg and Mauthausen.  Helga kept a diary from 1939 on and documented her daily experiences including the increasing Nazi brutality in a diary.  Helga’s Diary resounds with a ferocious will to endure conditions of astonishing cruelty. It displays a rare capacity to remain keenly observant while shutting down the feelings that would normally reduce a person to despair and, then, to find the right words for transmitting an essential approximation of experience from memory into history, as an admonition for all time.