The Diary of Petr Ginz, 1941–1942 Read online

  International Praise for The Diary of Petr Ginz:

  “The Diary of Petr Ginz is a gift from history, a gift from the heavens—a fragment of a life extinguished by the Holocaust.”

  —Bill Glauber, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “Recalling the diaries of … Anne Frank, Ginz’s diaries reveal a budding Czech literary and artistic genius whose life was cut short by the Nazis. [This] collection of diary entries, poems, short stories, and drawings offers keen insights into the reality of everyday life of Jews in wartime Prague.”

  —Ladka M. Bauerova, International Herald Tribune

  “Simply put, this book should be read by everyone.”

  —Daniel A. Olivas, The Jewish Journal of Greater L.A.

  “Petr Ginz was a brilliant child. … His writings are eyewitness reflections in evil times, written by a boy who possessed sensitivity, a sense of mischief, and ironic wit.”

  —Paul Gary, The Herald Sun (Sydney)

  “[An] extraordinary personal diary.”

  —George Cohen, Booklist

  “The Diary of Petr Ginz is by its very nature a sacred text. It’s also illuminating, beguiling, compelling, and, from the outset, unbearable. … [Written with] boyish reticence, [a] mix of sharp wit and naivety, [and] unrelenting focus … Petr’s work should be seen as divine resistance. But if this is salvation, it feels like hell.”

  —Julie Szego, The Age (Australia)

  “[Petr] simply has no time for breast-beating or self-pity, because his inborn curiosity about geography, history, mathematics, literature, and the fine arts sustains him even as the death toll in Prague rises. … Chava Pressburger has edited the diary with affection. … Inspiring in its determination to enjoy the few comforts life has to offer.”

  —Paul Bailey, The Independent (UK)

  “Gripping … This diary will become as important as those of Anne Frank or Victor Klemperer.”

  —Focus (Germany)

  “A moving and valuable addition to the personal literature of the Holocaust.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Handsomely illustrated … [Petr’s] appetite for life and passion for creativity lend these pages a quiet heroism.”

  —Theo Richmond, Sunday Times (London)

  “[Petr Ginz] kept a straightforward, calm record of his days. … Embellished with his wry poetry and his stark, intense linocuts and drawings, the diary entries are short, many no more than a few sentences, but they reveal volumes about the Nazis’ draconian methods.”

  —Alison Hood, Bookpage

  “Hugely moving.”

  —Melissa McClements, Financial Times

  “Inventive, creative, and witty, [Petr] was also in possession of an amazing inner strength. … This is an extraordinarily moving testimony of a budding artist who gave meaning to words in the light of unspeakable human destruction.”

  —The Good Book Guide

  The Diary of Petr Ginz

  1941–1942

  Edited by Chava Pressburger

  Translated from the Czech by Elena Lappin

  Copyright © 2004 by Chava Pressburger

  Translation copyright © 2007 by Elena Lappin

  Foreword copyright © 2007 by Jonathan Safran Foer

  All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe reproduced in any form

  or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof,

  including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission

  in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief

  passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to

  photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who

  would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology,

  should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Original Czech edition published as Denik meho bratra by Trigon Publishers, Prague, 2004

  Illustrations and photographs: copyright © 2004 by Chava Pressburger

  Drawings by Petr Ginz: Gift of Otto Ginz, Haifa, and from the collection of

  the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem

  The translator wishes to thank David Curzon for his help translating Petr Ginz’s poem

  “Remembering Prague” and the poem that appears on page 59.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST PAPERBACK EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ginz, Petr, d. 1944.

  [Denik Mého Bratra. English]

  The diary of Petr Ginz / translated from the Czech by Elena Lappin ; introduction by

  Chava Pressburger.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9546-3

  1. Ginz, Petr, d. 1944—Diaries. 2. Jews—Czech Republic—Diaries. 3. Jewish children

  in the Holocaust—Czech Republic—Diaries. 4. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Czech

  Republic—Diaries. I. Title.

  DS135.C97G55413 2007

  940.53’18092—dc22

  [B]

  2006047918

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  Contents

  What We Say We Are

  Translator’s Note

  Introduction

  Editor’s Note

  Petr Ginz’s Diary: September 19, 1941–February 23, 1942

  Family Photos

  Petr Ginz’s Diary: February 24, 1942–

  The Last Meeting

  Writings from Theresienstadt

  Notes to Petr Ginz’s Diaries

  Acknowledgments

  The Fates of Those in Petr’s Diary

  Drawings

  What We Say We Are

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Petr Ginz’s parents met at an Esperanto conference. That detail jumped out at me from the introduction to Petr’s diary, written by his sister, Chava Pressburger. A failed language—a bad idea born out of a good instinct—Esperanto held the promise of universal communication. Everyone would understand everyone all the time: a new Eden would grow out of the rubble of Babel. Petr was, quite literally, the product of that dream.

  How much suffering is due to not having the right word? Foreign words are unknown, familiar words are misunderstood or misinterpreted. Words are perverted by our histories (personal and global), by context and tone of voice. Words are bad approximations. There is evil in the world. Evil took young Petr from his parents and shuffled him into the gas chambers of Auschwitz. But evil is not the only thing to fear or struggle against.

  I read Petr’s diary as the grandson of survivors, as a first-generation American, as a Jew, and as a writer. Unexpectedly, it was this last identity that most informed my experience. While the diary in your hands is a resoundingly good book—by just about every imaginable definition—what it stands in opposition to isn’t evil, but speechlessness.

  * * *

  Giving a word to a thing is to give it life. “Let there be light,” God said, “and there was light.” No magic. No raised hands and thunder. The articulation made it possible. It is the most powerful of all Jewish ideas: words are generative. Jews are people of the book: their parents are words.

  It’s the same with marriage. You say “I do” and you do. What is it, really, to be married? To be married is to say you are married. To say it not only in front of your spouse, but in front of your community, and
in front of God. I don’t believe in God, but I believe in saying things to God. I believe in prayer. Or I believe in saying aloud what you would pray for if you believed in God. Saying it brings it into an existence that it didn’t have in silence.

  I once read an essay by a linguist about the continued creation of modern Hebrew. Until the mid-1970s, he wrote, there wasn’t a word for frustrated. And so until the mid-seventies, no Hebrew speaker experienced frustration. Should his wife turn to him in the car and ask why he’d fallen so quiet, he would search his incomplete dictionary of emotions and say, “I’m upset.” Or, “I’m annoyed.” Or, “I’m irritated.” This might have been, itself, merely frustrating, were it not for the problem of our words being self-fulfilling prophecies: we become what we say we are. The man in the car says he is upset, annoyed, or irritated and becomes upset, annoyed, or irritated.

  Exactly a year ago today, my first child was born. After much debate—the single word was the most difficult piece of writing I have ever done—we named him Sasha, after his grandmother. He is not only identified as Sasha, he is Sasha. My son would not exist with another name.

  To name the unnamed. To bring the unnamed into existence. There are writers who hold mirrors to the world. “This is what it’s really like,” they say. “Exactly what it’s like. Down to the most exacting detail.” That’s fine. Such books are often nice to read, and at their best can give us clear and focused pictures of ourselves. But there’s something more to which writing can aspire.

  I’m not a religious person, but writing for me is religious in this sense: to write is to participate in the creation that began with that first naming, and will continue until someone or something finds an adequate word for “end.” To write is to bring into being things whose existences depend on their articulation. Our emotional dictionaries are incomplete, and so are our historical dictionaries, and ideological dictionaries, and our dictionaries of physical experiences, and memories, hopes, and regrets. The dictionaries of our lives are more empty than full. And so our lives are more empty than full. Until we have the words, we cannot be what we really are.

  The most powerful passage of Petr’s diary comes when he receives notification of his imminent transport to Theresienstadt concentration camp. His specificity, his unwillingness to become sentimental—the passage was written from memory in Theresienstadt—is overwhelming. But even more powerful, to me—maybe because I am a Jew, maybe because I am a novelist, or new father—is the simple fact of a fourteen-year-old writing in such a place. Surrounded by death, and facing his own, Petr put words on paper. Given his unprecedented situation, his words were unprecedented. He was creating new language. He was creating life.

  It can be dangerous to treat a diary like this as literature—to find beauty in it, and symbolism, and structure. But how can one not? Here is the beginning of the passage in which Petr recounts learning that he would soon be parted from his family:

  Don’t think that cleaning a typewriter is easy. There is cleaning and there is “cleaning.” If you want the typewriter to shine on the inside and on the outside, you have to remove the carriage and wipe the most invisible corners with a small brush. Then you have to use a blowpipe to clear it out. The most difficult part are the spaces between the typebars.

  When Adorno speculated about the possibility of literature after the Holocaust, he wasn’t asking something about art (as is commonly misunderstood), but about language itself. What meaning can words have in the light of such destruction? Can “loss” have any use? Can “war”? Can “love,” for that matter? Will we ever again be able to find the right word?

  The answer is yes—it was built into the question—but language must be reconstructed with an energy greater than that of its destruction. This is what we—as readers, writers, and speakers—do. We participate in tikkun olam, the repairing of the world, which began only moments after the world’s creation. Adam, the first man, was given the task of gathering the divine light—the goodness—that escaped the vessels broken by creation. Young Petr, another first man, had a preternatural knowledge of this. Why else, in the shadow of his death, would he have crafted these words as he did? How else could such an effort have been possible? By repairing the dictionary, he was repairing the world.

  The diary in your hands did not save Petr. But it did save us.

  Translator’s Note

  At fourteen, Petr Ginz wrote the equivalent of a captain’s log on a sinking ship: daily reports about the weather and accounts of the general situation and everyone’s activities. He does not mention feelings of fear, powerlessness, sadness, or pain. But they are heavily present in what is left unsaid. Translation usually means to render, faithfully and convincingly, all the nuances of an author’s voice—the words, the tone, the rhythm. In the case of Petr Ginz’s diaries, it was equally important to capture, or at least hint at, the grave silence surrounding his brief entries.

  But not all his writing in this book is of the same succinct quality. Petr Ginz was an extraordinary boy—artistic, inventive, creative, observant, very mischievous, and witty. He was extremely well informed about what was going on in the world at large and in his own environment, and, like the real writer he might have grown into, from time to time broke out of his concise style and allowed his feelings and opinions to find expression in a poem, story, or essay. There is a long poem about the humiliating Nazi laws Jews were forced to accept, which satirizes in the sharpest manner not only the absurdity of the rules themselves but also the Jews’ ability to live with them. There is a heartbreaking poem, written as an adolescent in Theresienstadt, about his feelings for the home and life he has lost in Prague. His articles and stories, written for the magazine he edited in Theresienstadt, reflect a unique ability to transcend the environment of a concentration camp and to focus instead on a rich inner world of spiritual and moral values. Everything he wrote was pointing to a future full of excitement and discovery.

  The most difficult passage to translate was his description of the day he found out about his own transport, written in Theresienstadt, from memory. Characteristically, it consists not of an emotional outpouring but mostly of a precise description of the work involved in cleaning typewriters, a job he was doing at the time. As I searched for all the right technical terms and even laughed at the pranks he teased his managers with, I understood and felt the acute necessity to concentrate on mundane reality even as it was crumbling all around him, and under his own feet. But the fourteen-year-old Petr Ginz had no illusions: “So I went home. While walking, I tried to absorb, for the last time, the street noise I would not hear again for a long time (in my opinion; Father and Mother were counting on just a few months).”

  As a translator, I felt I was watching this boy grow from a child (whose daily life in Prague went on in places so familiar to me from my own Jewish childhood there, many decades later) into a young man, his writing style changing accordingly. But not his voice, which never wavered in its maturity and astonishing self-control. I hope this translation also captures the man in the boy, the extraordinary man he would have become had he been allowed to live.

  —Elena Lappin

  London

  Petr Ginz (1928–1944), Moon Landscape, 1942–1944, pencil on paper, 14.5 × 21 cm; Gift of Otto Ginz, Haifa; Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem.

  Introduction

  Chava Pressburger

  1

  They were two small exercise books: one had soft black covers cut out from an old school notebook, the other was bound in stronger cardboard with black and yellow stripes, which had probably been removed from a notepad our parents had once used to write down daily household expenses. Petr had made the two exercise books himself from old paper, and used them as diaries. Things were scarce during the war years, and for Jewish children, a nice new exercise book from a stationery shop was completely out of reach.

  But Petr enjoyed making those notebooks, as he enjoyed any opportunity to be creative. He used the hand-bound b
ooks not only as diaries, but also for his literary writing, for his manuscripts. In his childish imagination he saw himself as a bookbinder, novelist, publisher, reporter, or scientist. He began writing the diary at the age of thirteen, and stopped shortly before he was deported to Theresienstadt, as a fourteen-year-old. The two diaries published here resurfaced in 2003, sixty years after they were written, under very unusual circumstances.

  When the American space shuttle Columbia was preparing for its takeoff in 2003, the crew included Ilan Ramon from Israel, whose mother had survived the Auschwitz extermination camp. Ilan wanted to take along into space a symbol of the tragedy of the Holocaust. He turned to the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, which, aside from many other documents and testaments, stored most of Petr’s preserved drawings.

  My brother was a very talented, creative, hardworking, and curious boy with very varied interests. He wrote articles, stories, and several short novels, and he also loved to draw and paint. His drawing Moon Landscape is evidence of Petr’s unusual imagination—and it was this drawing that had been selected by Yad Vashem and by Ilan Ramon to accompany him on his space flight.

  The tragic fate of space shuttle Columbia shook the world. The shuttle exploded upon reentering Earth’s atmosphere on February 1, 2003—what would have been Petr’s seventy-fifth birthday. Neither Ilan nor the other crew members survived the exploratory flight. A young life that could have made a vast contribution to the progress of all mankind ended in just one moment. The death of the Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon reawakened the memory of hundreds of thousands of young people who had also stood at the threshold of lives that had been cut short by the Holocaust. Petr Ginz represents and symbolizes these young people.

  In the end, it was this drawing by Petr, carried into space by Ilan Ramon, that brought from darkness into the light of day the pages of Petr’s diary, written by him from February 24, 1941, until August 1942. Several weeks after the tragic end of space shuttle Columbia, someone from Prague contacted the Yad Vashem Museum and offered to sell six exercise books full of Petr’s writings, and his drawings. He found these remnants in an old house in Praha Modrany, which he bought some years ago. Although he threw away most of the junk that had filled that old house, he kept these notebooks and drawings, for some inexplicable reason. He was reminded of his “discovery” when Czech television described, in connection with the tragedy of space shuttle Columbia, the fate of Prague boy Petr Ginz. Shortly thereafter, he e-mailed to Israel samples of the texts and drawings he had found.