THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019 43
PERSONAL HISTORY
MY TEREZÍN DIARY
And what I did not write about.BY ZUZANA JUSTMAN
PHOTOGRAPH BY THOMAS ALBDORF
O
n a freezing day in January,
1944, after my family and I
had been confined at Terezín
for six months, my mother was arrested
by the S.S. and placed in a basement
cell in the dreaded prison at their camp
headquarters. Not even her lover, who
was a member of the Terezín Aeltesten-
rat, or Council of Elders—the Jewish
governing body—could get her released.
I was twelve years old, and I was afraid
that I would never see her again. But
on February 21, 1944, all I wrote in my
diary was “Mommy was away from us.”
What is most striking to me today about
the diary I kept seventy-five years ago
is what I left out.
I kept the diary from December 8,
1943, until March 4, 1944—the first win-
ter of the two years I was imprisoned
with my parents, Viktor Pick and Marie
Picková, and my brother, Bobby, in the
Czech concentration camp. (The camp
was also known as Theresienstadt.) In
addition to eight entries, it contains a
few drawings, a poem about snow, and
a story dealing with Terezín morality.
Right after the war, I added a list of my
girlfriends, marking the names of those
who did not survive with a minus sign.
When I first returned to the diary,
many years ago, I found it difficult to
read. Picking up the small book, three
inches by four inches, with its cover of
frayed green leather and its entries in
tiny writing, I was not ready to be re-
minded of that terrible first winter in
Terezín. I did not have much patience
with my childish pronouncements (“Now
I see, though, that it is possible to find
happiness in work and in other things”)
and my determined attempts to look at
the bright side (“It will get better with
time”). I put the diary away, and then
for a long time I could not remember
where I had hidden it. It was only a few
years ago that I finally discovered it,
on a high shelf of my closet, and, to my
surprise, I saw it in a new light.I no longer remember the big fight
that I had with my parents on Decem-
ber 9, 1943, but I do recognize myself in
the girl who wrote, “I had been terribly
fresh, but then I cried. Mommy tried to
talk to me about it, but I think that I will
not change.” The passage goes on, “After
a while, I calmed down, because I looked
over at two beds by the stove occupied
by a mother and child who had arrived
yesterday from Prague. The woman came
here directly from prison. She was sit-
ting on her bed not knowing what to do.
Her husband may be in Prague. So she
is even more unhappy than I am.” Here
I recognize myself again: to this day, when
I feel blue I console myself by thinking
of someone who is worse off than I am.
In rereading my diary this time, I
became more tolerant of my youthful
writing and allowed myself to remem-
ber the sadness and the loneliness that
motivated it. Some children who kept
diaries in Terezín wanted to document
life around them. I wrote mine mostly
to relieve my loneliness. It begins and
ends with a wish to find a friend. I was
longing for someone who would share
my secrets and listen to my troubles.
But, in fact, I was not completely
without friends during this time. Mar-
iana Kornová and Jiří Satz both lived
close to me. Mariana was a gifted writer,
and she and I liked to collect words and
expressions that struck us as exotic. We
wrote them down on little pieces of
paper that we sometimes buried. I still
have a scrap of pink paper with “in-
flagranti” and “negližé” written on it.
I knew Jiří from the Jewish school
in Prague, where he was the most pop-
ular boy in my class. In Terezín, my
mother and I had been assigned places
in the “attic,” a large area under the roof
of Q306, a two-story house divided into
two sections, with about forty women
and children on either side. When I
arrived at my new quarters, I was thrilled
Museum in Prague. to see that his bed was not far from