cover image The Terezin Diary of Gonda Redlich

The Terezin Diary of Gonda Redlich

Egon Redlikh. University Press of Kentucky, $24 (173pp) ISBN 978-0-8131-1804-8

These recently discovered diaries were kept by a Czech Zionist youth leader during the nearly three years he spent in the Nazi's ``model ghetto,'' created outside Prague as a transit camp for Jews en route to death in the East. The book offers a poignant, detailed record of the inmates' daily struggle for survival and their painful pretense of leading a normal life. Copiously annotated by Youngstown State University history professor Friedman and ably translated by Kutler, a visiting professor of Hebrew at Kent State University, the diaries recount Redlich's heroic efforts to care for and educate Terezin's 15,000 children and his agony as a member of the Transport and Appeals committees, forced to help fill quotas that selected fellow inmates for deportation to Auschwitz and other death camps. His romantic, compassionate, hopeful spirit bravely denied and defied defeat until his own deportation, together with his wife and son, in October 1944. Photos not seen by PW. (Nov.)