The Diary of Petr Ginz

The Diary of Petr Ginz
by Petr Ginz

The Diary of Petr Ginz
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Book Summary Information

Author: Petr Ginz
Editor: Chava Pressburger
Translator: Elena Lappin
Introduction: Jonathan Safran Foer
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-09-01
ISBN: 0802143601
Number of pages: 192
Publisher: Grove Press

Book Reviews of The Diary of Petr Ginz

Book Review: The Monument of a Gifted Boy in a Terrible Time
Summary: 5 Stars

Although the Holocaust diaries of adult writers contain greater historical detail, those of children and young adults give us a perspective of what it is like to be a person in the early years of life, full of both fear and hope. Petr Ginz was a remarkable person in so many ways, a talented artists, writer, humorist, and reporter. His artistic legacy is one of a young man who faced unimaginable adversities with courage, dignity, and hope (even when there was little reason to hope).

This beautiful diary covers Ginz's life in Prague, as the Nazi stranglehold creates new social and economic restrictions against the Jewish population with each passing day, and continues with life in Terezin, what was supposed to be a model ghetto but was, in truth, a model of Nazi lies and deception. Petr's sister, Chave Pressburger, who survived the war, adds notes on the underground newspaper he edited at Terezin, Vedem. (For further information on Vedem, I heartily recommend the book "We Are Children Just the Same."

A little over a half century later, Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon selected a copy of Petr's most famous work, Moonscape, as one souvenir to take aboard the space shuttle Columbia. It was that mission that ended in tragedy, the spacecraft disintegrating as it entered Earth's atmosphere. I like to think that both these great dreamers have reunited in Heaven, united in their dreams for a peaceful and just world.

Summary of The Diary of Petr Ginz

Not since Anne Frank?sThe Diary of a Young Girlhas such an intimately candid, deeply affecting account of a childhood compromised by Nazi tyranny come to light. As a fourteen-year-old Jewish boy living in Prague in the early 1940s, Petr Ginz dutifully kept a diary that captured the increasingly precarious texture of daily life.  His stunningly mature paintings, drawings, and writings reflect his insatiable appetite for learning and experience and openly display his growing artistic and literary genius. Petr was killed in a gas chamber at Auschwitz at the age of sixteen. His diaries—recently discovered in a Prague attic under extraordinary circumstances—are an invaluable historical document and a testament to one remarkable child?s insuppressible hunger for life.

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