The Terezn Album of Marinka Zadikow

About this book

With simple means without any title this book should in distant times always be in your memory. An imprisoned bookbinder wrote these words in a small blank book that he had secretly crafted from pilfered materials at the Terezn (Theresienstadt) concentration camp in September 1944. He presented the album to a fellow prisoner twenty-one-year-old Marianka Zadikw. Over the next several months as the Nazis pressed forward with mass deportations from Terezn to Auschwitz Marianka began to collect inscriptions and sketches from her fellow inmates. Marianka Zadikwsalbum presented here in a facsimile edition is a poignant document from the last months of the Holocaust. The words and images inscribed hereby children and grandparents factory workers and farmhands professionals and intellectuals musicians and artistsreflect both joy and trepidation. They include passages of remembered verse lovingly executed drawings and hurried farewells on the eve of transport to Auschwitz. The great German-Jewish scholar Rabbi Leo Baeck one of the elders of the camp offers Marianka an inscription about Jewish self-discovery and participants in Terezns now-famous musical performances fill several pages with musical annotation. Facing-page translations render the books multitude of languages into English while historical and biographical notes give details where known of the fates of those whose words are recorded here. An introduction by acclaimed Holocaust scholar Debrah Dwork tells the story of the Terezn camp and how Marianka and her family fared while imprisoned there. The array of voices and the glimpses into individual lives afforded us by The Terezn Album make it an arresting reminder of the sustaining power of care community and hope amid darkness.