Terezín Album of Mariánka Zadikow

'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 Terezin (Theresienstadt) concentration camp in September 1944. He presented the album to a fellow prisoner, twenty-one-year-old Marianka Zadikow. Over the next several months, as the Nazis pressed forward with mass deportations from Terezin to Auschwitz, Marianka began to collect inscriptions and sketches from her fellow inmates.Marianka Zadikow's album, presented here in a facsimile edition, is a poignant document from the last months of the Holocaust. The words and images inscribed here - by children and grandparents, factory workers and farmhands, professionals and intellectuals, musicians and artists - reflect both joy and trepidation. They include passages of remembered verse, lovingly executed drawings, and hurried farewells on the eve of transport to Auschwitz.Facing-page translations render the book's many 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 Holocaust scholar Deborah Dwork tells the story of the Terezin camp and how Marianka and her family fared while imprisoned there. The array of voices and the glimpses into individual lives that "The Terezin Album" affords make it an arresting reminder of the sustaining power of care, community, and hope amid darkness.

Marianka Zadikow May was born in Germany but fled to her mother's native Czechoslovakia when she was a girl. She and her family were deported to Terezin in 1942. After the war she relocated to the United States, and she now lives in upstate New York. Deborah Dwork is the Rose Professor of Holocaust History and the Director of the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. She is the author or coauthor of many books, including Children With A Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe, Holocaust: A History, and Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present.