Petr was one of the boys in “heim” 1 of building L-417. Petr and his bunkmates Kurt Kotouc and George Brady put out a secret magazine, called Vedem. Only Kurt Kotouc survived. Below is an account written by Petr's younger brother, who did survive.

This [the 6th picture at right and below] is the last picture of my brother Petr Ginz. It was taken in the 1940s in Prague, probably at the villa of our relatives, the Levituses. From the left are my uncle Emil Ginz and his wife Nada. Beside her you can see my mother Marie Ginzova and my cousin Eva Sklenckova, the daughter of my mother's sister Bozena. Behind them you can see from the left Petr and then Pavel, the son of Emil and Nada. They were transported together to Auschwitz. Both perished.

My brother was born in 1928 in Prague. Our childhood was more or less the same. Petr was two years older and I loved him very much. He had his bar mitzvah in the Maisel Synagogue in Prague, I remember that afterwards there was a small celebration at home with relatives, and a chocolate cake. Petr was a talented boy, and when Jews were no longer being accepted at high school, my parents put him in a school named the Experimental School, in Nusle. It was a special school for talented children where they were attempting to teach with not completely conventional methods. Our parents thought that here his talent would take root and develop. But soon after they threw Petr out of this school as well, because of his Jewish origin. My brother was always very curious and Mother and Father supported education.

Petr began to write already as a child; he wrote many articles, stories and poems. He drew a lot as well. He wrote several short stories from the age of 11 to 12: 'Ferda's Adventures', 'From Prague to China', 'Journey to the Center of the Earth', which belong to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and later from the ages of 13 to 14, more voluminous novels, 'The Secret of the Devil's Cave', 'The Wise Man of Altai', 'Around the World in a Second' and 'A Visit from Prehistoric Times'. Somewhere Petr notes that he's already got 260 pages of 'The Wise Man of Altai' finished. Unfortunately only 'A Visit from Prehistoric Times' survived, the rest of the later novels was lost. But perhaps, like his diaries, those works will also surface somewhere. I own 'A Visit from Prehistoric Times'. Like every young boy, he liked to read Verne's novels full of fantasy. Petr imagined that he had found a forgotten novel of Verne's, in the attic of Verne's old apartment building, translated it from French to Czech, and that he's presenting it for the first time to Czech readers. It's about some prehistoric reptile that lives somewhere in the Belgian Congo. In the novel he describes this monster, which is in reality a large robot, controlled by a dictator who through it wants to dominate the entire continent, and all of Africa is terrified of it. It's an analogy to Hitler and is relatively long. Petr bound and illustrated the book himself. He wrote the novel shortly before he was transported away in 1942, so he wasn't yet 14 at the time.

Petr Ginz, Kurt Kotouc, and George Brady were all in home 1 of building L-417. They put out a secret magazine, called Vedem. Kurt Kotouc survived, and kept some issues. Below is some of his interview as an adult survivor. Read more at www.centropa.org.

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The Weinsteins returned from the interrogation [by the gestapo] later and were silent about what had happened. Our parents were put into jail: my father was sent to the Kounic Hall and my mother was sent to the jail at Cejl. By strange coincidence, we had a chance to see my father for a few seconds a couple of times after that. It was permitted to bring clean laundry into the residence once a week. During one of these times, my brother saw my father in the window of the building. So then we would regularly try and walk by there at the same time of day and my father sometimes did look out of the glass window. However, after a short period of time, my parents were deported to concentration camps. In 1942, they were both murdered in Auschwitz; my mother was in Ravensbruck before this.

At that time, my brother and I didn't know about the death of our parents. Basically, we stayed alone, I was twelve and my brother was seventeen. Of our relatives, only my father's mother and sister lived in Brno, but grandma was over eighty and my aunt was chronically ill. They were both quite powerless. In 1942 they were murdered in Treblinka and Rejowiec [Poland]. We received a permit to move to our family in Mohelno. I was looking forward to escaping the scary atmosphere of Brno but in Mohelno it was no better. We hardly went out on the streets: in the village, our fate was that much more uncommon and visible and the yellow star on our clothing that much more humiliating. We were included in the transport leaving from Trebic. In May 1942, a family friend, a farmer named Rudolf Mohelsky took myself, my grandma, my aunt, my brother and our 50 kg baggage by horse-drawn carriage to Trebic. It was a beautiful spring day. At the Trebic school they transformed the transport of people into camp numbers. In the train we were with Grandma Josefina and Aunt Greta together for the last time, because after our arrival in Terezin we were separated at the so-called sluice. [Sluice: from the German word Schleusse. That is what the place where the transports were received and checked out was called.] We didn't even know when they dragged them out further east. They were murdered in the concentration camps in Auschwitz and Lublin in 1942.

In Terezin I was placed in Sudeten barracks; my brother was elsewhere. We were not allowed to leave the barracks and walk freely in the streets until 6th July 1942. [The civilian population left Terezin at the beginning of July 1942 and then the whole city became a ghetto.] For me it was a very bad time because I didn't have anyone there, I didn't know anyone and I knew nothing about my parents, my brother, my grandma or my aunt. I remember when the barracks were opened I ran out of the gates with a whole mob of people and everyone was looking for their relatives.

Gradually, my brother worked in a number of locations. At one time, he worked in the disinfection squad where he used very dangerous gas; I think it was called Ventox. For some time he worked in a kitchen as a helper and so at least he could eat a little better.

The Jewish self government starting organizing life in the ghetto and I was lucky because I got into building L-417. It was in a Terezin school building where there were ten boys' 'heims' [homes in German]. Each home had its own room, its own caretaker, who we called 'madrich' [leader in Hebrew], its own number and its own name. I was in number one. The dozen boys, who were all around thirteen, who came together at number one created a specific social group that was different from the other units in the building. The reason for its specific character was the age difference. With the exception of home number five, we were the only ones who were coming of age. At the beginning of the occupation we were too grown up to be able to lock ourselves into the microcosm of children. Actually, all these events sped up the process of growing up, at least psychologically and spiritually. We witnessed our homes being uprooted and our parents' powerlessness. Marked with stars and transport numbers, in quarantine and in sluice, we saw the fall of conventions, the fragility and impermanence of human relationships, selflessness and selfishness, we listened to the heavy breathing of the dying and to the breathing of couples making love.

That is the state our madrich, Valtr Eisinger, got us in. He himself was also quite young: he was twenty-nine years old. He was a talented teacher who was just starting out. He was given the opportunity to test his abilities, live out his ideals about life and the world. He had so much to do to take care of himself and on top of it he wanted to help us. We loved his confidence and his certainty in that unpredictable ghetto world. Eisinger didn't question surviving but announced, 'after the war, I will try for a doctorate.' He was close to us, that is why we could and wanted to follow the example of our great teacher who spoke about the philosophy of Ghandi, translated poetry, played soccer, moved into the dorms with us, sang in the opera 'Prodana nevesta' [The Bartered Bride, opera by Czech composer Bedrich Smetana] and loved his wife Vera from Terezin. Awareness of our common fate and Eisinger's personality allowed us to create a social atmosphere that made no difference between an orphan and the son of a scientist.

We called our group 'Republika Skid.' The name came from Eisinger who told us about the Russian book 'Republika Skid' that he liked very much. [Boys literature, by Belych, Grigoriy Georgiyevich and Panteleev, Alexei Ivanovich, 1927.] We were all taken by this and we wanted to be Skids. In brief a Skid comes from the 'Skola Imeni Dostoyevskovo' [school called after Dostoyevsky], a school for the homeless kids in post-revolution St. Petersburg [orphanage]. A Skid was secret. Although a symbol of our home hung on our wall Eisinger told us to explain this title to strangers as 'Skola I. domov' [school in house number one]. We were therefore a republic and had our own leadership, which was established on a festive Friday night on 18th December 1942. We were each given duties and responsibilities that corresponded with our interests and abilities. The members of the group were elected to different functions and at one time I acted as the chairman. A notable characteristic of Skid was that it was a collective where each person found their place.

One of Eisinger's strongest characteristics was his sense of tolerance. He himself firmly believed in a new, socially just way of organizing the world, but he didn't require us to mechanically take on his beliefs. In contrast, he said at our age it would be too early for us to have a set opinion, first he thought it was important to experience and know many things. His opinion came across in his practice; the diverse lectures in our home were a good example. People with all sorts of opinions visited us. For Eisinger it was dangerous to organize this kind of upbringing in a concentration camp [ghetto], with a flag, a group hymn and even a magazine that we produced. Back then, we didn't understand that; for us it was an adventure and it gave us the illusion of freedom.

The magazine Vedem was exclusively the domain of us, the boys. Professor Eisinger only wrote introductions and sometimes he contributed with a translation from Russian. On Friday night we would always sit around the table, or on the bunks and each person who had written something that week would read their contribution. The magazine was not publicized in any other way than during these Friday night session. For two whole years, we 'put out' our magazine each Friday thanks to the leadership of our editor, Petr Ginz. Petr was great for this work, he had all the right predispositions; he had brought them from home, from Prague. He was an extremely intelligent boy. He was a year older than us. He even had experience editing a magazine, I think from the time when he studied in Prague. He spent all his time working on the magazine, all week, day after day he worked on the latest issue. It was hard work, especially when he handwrote all the contributions that he had gotten in any way he possibly could. He would make a fuss and he would try to appeal to our consciences but sometimes he wrote the entire issue himself under different names to save the situation. I would try and get contributions from the boys and sometimes from the adults; here and there I wrote something and took care of organizational details. The magazine reflected many of the personalities in Terezin and house number one became a well-known place in the ghetto. That is why different, noted guests would come to us: people like Karel Polacek, Norbert Fryd, Hans Adler and different personalities like that, who would come lecture or come and chat about something with us. Petr was a really great guy. I can still see him sitting on his bunk with his legs under him, working away on something. Petr was dragged away to Auschwitz in September 1944 where he died in the gas chamber.

On a regular day at L-417, forty boys would go do different work around the ghetto. They were chosen from the homes where the oldest boys lived: homes one and five. I myself began going to work in 1943. It wasn't particularly hard work; usually we worked in the vegetable garden in the barricades around Terezin. At least we had a little bit of nature there. We were supervised by one Jewish gardener, a very sympathetic young man, who we called Manci; I think his real name was Manuel. Occasionally, we were allowed to steal a tomato or a kohlrabi. The special thing about the group who worked in the garden was that to go to work we had to walk through a few hundred meters on 'free land', if that is what you can call the streets of the Protectorate [of Bohemia and Moravia].

The wake up call was at six or seven in the morning, then we washed under cold water, cleaned the living quarters, and divided the daily duties: that is cleaning the rooms, the halls, the WC and the courtyard. Then we had breakfast and roll call. All the members of the homes gathered on the steps and the leader of L-417, Otik Klein, outlined the daily plan. Then the teaching began that all the children in the building attended. The teaching happened in the individual homes, but because of lack of space it mostly occurred in the attic, where it was also less likely that we would be barged in on by the SS. Wherever we were taught, one boy was always on guard duty. Each class was prepared to immediately start doing something different, like cleaning, in case the SS came to check up on us.

Of the eight or ten teachers, only two or three were trained teachers. We didn't have any resources and often children of very different ages and from different educational backgrounds were put together in the same classes. None the less, the teachers tried to establish some kind of system and they would consult each other at teacher meetings. They taught for about three or four hours a day. To this day, I still remember math, history and geography. Hebrew was not 'mandatory.' The system wasn't only about the teaching, but also about the day to day living of the boys with the teachers and caretakers. I realized how effective it had been after coming back from the concentration camp: I found myself in a normal school and actually, I was not behind at all.

We would go to lunch with a mug where one had to wait in a line in front of the kitchen in the Hamburg barracks. Afterwards we reviewed the material we had learned in the morning but without the teachers. Real free time started in the late afternoon before supper, between four and six. Some of the kids had their parents or other relatives in Terezin and so they would go visit them during this time. After supper, the homes became separate worlds, where the children would entertain themselves differently, depending on their age and their caretakers' abilities. We, the older ones, would stay up later. We even got to see the famous Terezin attic performances: cabaret, theater recitals and concerts.

I also remember expeditions, where after dark we would go to steal coal. Once I almost paid for it dearly because I couldn't crawl back out of some basement. 'Lights out' was at ten but we chatted after that until even the hardiest fell asleep. Those were magical moments, when the lights were out and we spoke to each other from the bunks. Eisinger was a great storyteller, we could have listened to him talk for hours. It is important to explain that it was unusual for a caretaker to live in the home. The caretakers had their own room in L-417. Just the fact that Eisinger decided to really live like one of us says more about him than words can ever say.

My brother and I were in Terezin until October 1944, until a series of transports practically wiped out the ghetto. My brother was deported at the beginning of October and my deportation ensued a few days later. I think there were seven transports and they went quickly one after the other. We didn't know where we were going at all, first the train headed west to Dresden but there it turned east. It probably went in a zig zag fashion because in the freight car some prisoner from the transport before us wrote in pencil 'to Auschwitz.' In Auschwitz-Birkenau, where 1,500 of us came to, most people went directly from the train into the gas chambers. Back then we didn't know what it was all about, but somehow I knew that I should group myself with people who were stronger. When we came to the ramp in Auschwitz, the prison camp guards jumped into the trains that they called 'Kanada' and they started taking our baggage. There was a young guy among them and I refused to give him my things. And he asked me, 'Wie alt bist du?' [German: How old are you?]. I told him I was fifteen or sixteen. And he advised me, 'Musst sagen du bist achtzehn!' [German: You have to say that you are eighteen!]. When I stepped out on the ramp, no one asked me for my age, but I tried to stick to the group of prisoners who were physically stronger, who then went to the camp together.

About a hundred or a hundred and ten boys went through house number one in Terezin and of those about ten survived the Holocaust. Zdenek Taussig brought the magazine Vedem from Terezin to Prague; he was the only one from the entire 'Heim' who had stayed in Terezin the whole time. His father was a blacksmith in Terezin and he was the only one capable of re-shoeing a horse. Zdenek lived with him in the blacksmithery; they converted the coal storage room into a place to sleep. After returning to Prague, he passed the magazine on to my friend from house number one, Jirka Brady, who gave the material to me when he emigrated in 1948. Life went differently than we had dreamed.