The Diary of Petr Ginz: 1941-1942

Chava Pressburger. re Petr Ginz

ISBN 10: 0871139669 / ISBN 13: 9780871139665

Published by New York, New York, U.S.A.: Atlantic Monthly Pr, 2007

About this Item

hb, 8vo, NF/NF, 155p followed by paintings.

Seller Inventory # 609

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Diary of Petr Ginz: 1941-1942
• Publisher: New York, New York, U.S.A.: Atlantic Monthly Pr
• Publication Date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0871139669
• ISBN 13: 9780871139665
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • military

About this title

Synopsis

<div>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&#8217;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 Fortunately, Petr's voice lives on in his diary, a fresh, startling, and invaluable historical document and a testament to one remarkable child's insuppressible hunger for life.</div>

Review

Petr's [diary] offers an unsentimental perspective on his changing world, and one that fits his personality: half scientist, half reporter and all, still, little boy... Petr acts as a child historian, and this is where the book derives much of its haunting power. -- Ashley Parker * New York Times * Inspiring. -- Paul Bailey * Independent * Hugely moving. * Financial Times * Impossible to read without tears. * Glasgow Herald * Heartbreaking... A book that may well be as important a diary of the Holocaust as Anne Frank's. * Tablet *