Petr Ginz

ABOUT PETR GINZ

This native of Czechoslovakia lost his life in the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp during the latter half of World War II. Many decades after Ginz's death, his sister Chava (Eva) Pressburger published his childhood diary under the title of Diary of My Brother.

Before being sent to the Terezin concentration camp at age fourteen, this exceptionally bright boy had written several novels, including The Wizard from Altay Mountains and A Visit from Prehistory.

Sadly, a childhood drawing of Ginz's that was carried to space by an Israeli astronaut named Ilan Ramon was destroyed in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster of 2003. Coincidentally and tragically, the accident occurred on what would have been Ginz's seventy-fifth birthday.

He was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, to a Jewish textile manager father and a non-Jewish mother. As the children of a marriage of mixed religious heritage, he and his sister were subject to the Nazi regime's mass extermination plan; his sister survived the Holocaust, while he did not.

He and fellow Holocaust victim Anne Frank both wrote diaries that were later published.