Pictures of a Strange Town : A Story of the Terezin Ghetto - Sandra Lee Braude

There is a strange town, situated some sixty miles from Prague. It is called Terezin, and the story of what happened there during World War Il is a strange story.

Terezin, which was built as military fortress at the end of the 18* century, by Emperor Josef, was turned into a Jewish ghetto in 1940. It was presented to the world as 'Hitler's gift to the Jews, but was really intended as a transit point to the concentration camps in the east. The Jews who were transported there lived under terrible conditions, and many died. Of the 15 000 children who passed through Terezin, only about 100 survived.

Ruzenka Loew could have been any of the children in Terezin.

Despite all the hardships, she finds friendship and love. She also finds meaning through art, working under Fried Dicker Brandeis, who was a highly accomplished artist and teacher and who will always be remembered for the way in which she taught and inspired the children of Terezin.

Pictures of a Strange Town is a deeply moving story which brings to the reader an understanding of the lives of Jewish children in the ghetto of Terezin.

Terezin is a word that will always evoke in us memories of war and death. The Terezin Ghetto is a symbol of cruelty and hopelessness.

(Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic, in his foreword to We are children just the same: Vedem, the secret magazine by the boys of Terezin.)

'If we're only given a day, we have to live it.' (Friedl Dicker Brandeis)

At the end of the war I was appointed co-ordinator of the children and youth department of the former Ghetto, and as such I was in charge of the repatriation of the young Ghetto population. On one of the last days of August 1945, I brought the treasure of two suitcases full of the children's drawings to the Prague Jewish community. More than ten years later those drawings had become the "diamonds in the crown" öf the Holocaust. (Dr Willy Groag).

Herstoria Press, Johannesburg, 2000, paperback