Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #87269 in Books
• Published on: 1995-10-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Synopsis
A total of 15000 children under the age of 15 passed through Terezin camp between 1942-44. Less than 100 survived. In these poems and pictures drawn by the young inmates we see the daily misery of these uprooted children, as well as their courage and optimism, their hopes and fears.

Customer Reviews

Moving
I bought this a few days after returning from Terazin itself. I was moved to tears when I was there and this little book made me cry again. The fact that these words and images came from the minds of small innocent children makes it all just too difficult to understand how human beings could to do what they did to others during those awful days in the middle of the last century, (i.e. still within living memory).

The saddest book you will ever read
How does one review something like this? I only wish I could give it 6 stars, or 10 or a million.

The Holocaust - one of the most incomprehensible and evil acts of the 20th century - like all terrible events is something that we don't like to talk about, in the same way that we turn the TV over when reports showing famime and death in third-world countries come on. This book does not show the horrors explicitly - it shows them through the poems and artwork of the children at Terezin Concentration Camp. Terezin was a stopping point where jews were sent before being sent to Auschwitz. The book tells us that of the 15,000 children sent to Terezin, only 100 survived.

A person would have to have a heart of stone to read this book without the tears flowing. Especially when you see things like the drawing of Jana Hellerova, who was sent to Terezin at the age of 5, and died in Auschwitz at the age of 6.

The title of the book comes from one of the poems in the book, which is deeply, deeply moving. Another remarkable piece of work is 'Terezin' by Hanus Hachenburg who was 13 and died in Auschwitz at 14.

The World must never let this happen again.

Guiding children's minds in the face of abominable evil.
This is one of the most remarkable works to come out of all the Holocaust literature. Both the drawings and paintings and the poetry and occasional prose would be impressive under any circumstances. That they were created in Terezìn makes them all the moreso. After rereading this volume all through my growing up years, I discovered much later as an adult visiting there and going through the exhibits, that there was a larger context to these images and words. There was an entire community of artists and musicians and composers, of teachers and educators who not only pursued their work while incarcerated, they also integrated the children into the creative process. The children were trained to perform an operetta so popular even the Nazis enjoyed it, enough to exploit it for propaganda purposes - contributing ironically to the dark fait awaiting nearly all the children who ever had filled its constantly rotating cast: eventual deportation to Auschwitz. What remains on these pages is a reflection of discipline and maturity in putting words on a page, in fixing the lines just right, in communicating the innocence and the agony of children - precious children - of various ages, trying to save a scrap of sanity, of meaning, of hope and beauty, of memory, in the darkest night of human transgression. These images we are left with are a testimony to art and to the souls of these little ones, that through their work they not be forgotten, and a testimony to the so-called "culture of poets and thinkers" as the Germans insisted on viewing themselves even then, while they systematically and with great zeal went about exterminating every one of these children.