44 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019
The author with her parents, Marie Picková and Viktor Pick, leaving a skating rink in Prague, in 1938.
COURTESY THE AUTHOR
mine. Jiří—or Jirka, as I called him—
had a nine-year-old brother, Petříček,
who used to entertain the attic inhab-
itants in the evening by performing
cabaret-style songs. The adults were
convinced that he would grow up to
be a big star and adored him, but Jirka
and I thought he was annoying and
would try to escape him when he fol-
lowed us around.
Jirka’s job was to herd sheep on the
camp ramparts. I sometimes sat with
him while he watched them, and one
day he engraved “Here Satz herded
sheep in the year 1944” on a little wall
high up on the ramparts, with our ini-
tials, “J” and “Z,” intertwined under-
neath. A few years ago, the inscription
was still there.
Mariana, Jirka, and Petříček all per-
ished in Auschwitz.B
ecause I was fearful that the diary
could fall into German hands and
bring harm to my family, I rarely ex-
pressed myself freely in it. I did not
mention my mother’s arrest. I wrote,with naïve caution, “Until the age of
eight I led a normal life ... but then a
foreign nation entered my country,”
which I must have imagined would be
less offensive to a potential Nazi reader
than saying straight out that Germany
had invaded Czechoslovakia. In an at-
tempt to provide better living condi-
tions for Terezín’s children, the Jewish
administration had opened so-called
Kinderheime for girls and boys. About
half the camp’s children lived in these
homes. When I described the classes
that I attended in a Terezín girls’ Kin-
derheim, I carefully added, “We mostly
play and read,” which was not true: we
studied various subjects, such as En-
glish and Judaism. I had inserted this
sentence because teaching was forbid-
den in the ghetto.
And the Germans were not the only
ones I worried about. “I sit by the stove,”
I wrote. “And I am constantly turning
around to see if anyone watches what I
am writing.” In a place where there was
no privacy, I tried to protect my diary
from intruding glances. I realize nowthat there was not a moment when I
believed that it was completely safe from
unwanted readers, whether Nazis or cu-
rious neighbors. But that was not the
only thing that kept me from writing
frankly. The biggest hindrance, I now
see, was my fear of my own feelings.S
hortly after our arrival in Terezín,
my parents joined an underground
group that had been newly formed to
receive food packages smuggled in from
the outside; when the organizer was
captured, he gave the S.S. my mother’s
name. My parents had been advised to
sign up with the group using her name,
since it was believed that a woman who
was arrested was less likely than a man
to be shot. My usually cautious parents
were hardly the type to engage in dan-
gerous activities, but soon after we got
to Terezín we had finished eating most
of the food we had brought with us,
and we were hungry. As part of our
meagre rations, each of us received a
quarter of a small oval loaf of rye bread;
I would keep cutting thin slices off my