I didn't even recognize my own mother till I heard her voice. Quite literally there wasn't even a hair left. 'The most moving Holocaust diary published since Anne Frank' Daily Telegraph First they led us to the baths, where they took from us everything we still had. Category: (G) General (US: Trade) (J) Children / Juvenile. Num Pages: 256 pages, 20 illustrations by the author, in black and white and colour, as well as photographs. For the next three years, Helga documented her experiences there, and those of her friends and family, in a diary. In 1941, aged 12, Helga Weiss, her mother and father were forced to say goodbye to their home, their relatives and all that they knew, and were interned in the Nazi concentration camp of Terezin. Her diary, illustrated with her childhood drawings, was translated into English and published in 2013 as Helga's Diary: A Young Girl's Account of Life in a Concentration Camp.Description for Helga's Diary Paperback. In 2009, President Václav Klaus presented her with the Medal of Merit of the Czech Republic. After the Velvet Revolution in November 1989, she exhibited her art in Prague and in other places in Europe. She worked as an artist and raised a family. She returned to Prague and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and under Czech artist Emil Filla.

After the war, her uncle was able to retrieve her diary for her. Of the estimated 15,000 children sent to Terezín and then to Auschwitz, Helga was one of only 100 survivors.

From Auschwitz, she was sent to a forced labor camp at Flossenbürg, and then on on a 16-day death march to the camp at Mauthausen. Before she was deported on to the death camp at Auschwitz at age 15 in 1944, her uncle, who worked in the Terezín records department, hid her diary and drawings in a brick wall. In 1941, she and her parents were sent to the concentration camp of Terezín (Theresienstadt), where she continued to write about her daily life. As she witnessed Nazi brutality toward her friends and neighbors, and eventually her own family, she began documenting her experiences in a diary. Her father was denied work and she was barred from attending her school. In 1939, she was an 11-year-old schoolgirl when she endured the first wave of the Nazi invasion of World War II. Her mother Irena Fuchsová was a seamstress, and her father Otto Weiss worked at the state bank.

Helga Weiss, later Hošková-Weissová, was born to a secular Jewish family in Prague, Czechoslovakia.

Helga's Diary by Helga Weiss