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Lost for sixty years in a Prague attic, this secret diary of a teenage prodigy killed at Auschwitz is an extraordinary literary discovery, an intimately candid, deeply affecting account of a childhood compromised by Nazi tyranny.
As a fourteen-year old Jewish boy living in Prague in the early 1940s, Petr Ginz dutifully records the increasingly precarious texture of daily life. With a child’s keen eye for the absurd and the tragic, he muses on the prank he played on his science class and then just pages later, reveals that his cousins have been called to relinquish all their possessions, having been summoned east in the next transport.
The diary ends with Petr's own summons to Thereisenstadt, where he would become the driving force behind the secret newspaper Vedem, and where he would continue to draw, paint, write, and read, furiously educating himself for a future he would never see.
Fortunately, Petr's voice lives on in his diary, a fresh, startling, and invaluable historical document and a testament to one remarkable child's insuppressible hunger for life.
Quote: As Goodreads summaries go, this one is quite decent. The book is incredibly moving, and I was an emotional wreck for much of the time I spent editing it. Because of the way it's laid out, the ebook mostly required careful line-by-line formatting, meaning I had to read every line closely rather than be able to skim text as one can with simpler books.
It is all the more affecting because of Petr's spare, matter-of-fact language.The translator sometimes falls into the trap of repeating original-language usage in English, which makes it a little clunky at times, but that is a minor irritation. She manages to convey Petr's underlying emotion and tension as he describes dispassionately the events of 1941 and 1942 leading up to his own deportation to Theresienstadt in October 1942. Early in the book we can read Petr's own account of the day of his departure from Prague, written some time later in Theresienstadt. It is remarkable for its lack of emotion, its matter-of-fact description of the frantic preparations, the tram journey, the goodbyes and the final kiss from his aunt.
In her introduction Petr's sister Eva (now Chava) gives a brief account of how the diaries came to light after sixty years hidden in a house in Prague. If the finder had not "for some inexplicable reason" decided to keep the diaries they would be lost to us, and we would not have had the privilege of knowing this "very talented, creative, hardworking, and curious boy".
A word of warning: this applies to all ebooks, but particularly those with a lot of images such as this one. A colour picture that looks brilliant in the Book view of my Sigil editor might look much less so on your e-reader. My 6yo Kindle doesn't handle images particularly well, but if you're reading online with ADE, the images reproduce very well. ADE, however, loses all the careful formatting that looks great in Sigil. I don't have the skills to overcome this, and I'm sorry if the results are visually inadequate. No matter - Petr's personality and talents will shine through.
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