Pavel Weiner (1931–2010)

Pavel Weiner was born to a Jewish family in Prague, Czechoslovakia. In 1944, at age 12, he was uprooted from his comfortable life and deported with his family by the Nazis to the ghetto-concentration camp at Terezín (Theresienstadt). There he kept a diary until shortly before liberation in April 1945. In his entries, Pavel wrote about what mattered to him: his relationships with other boys, his teachers, his family, his creative projects, and his first love, soccer.
He exposed the Potemkin village created by the Nazis for the benefit of the international community when he wrote entries such as this one on June 16, 1944, "Today the Red Cross Commission is expected. Everything is in tiptop shape. We are told to ride the carousel and go on the swings." He lost many family members in the Holocaust, including his father Ludwig and older brother Hanus, deported in September 1944; maternal grandparents Hermine and Zikmund Stein, maternal aunt Trude Stein, and paternal aunt and uncle Olga and Otto Susicky. Pavel and his mother survived World War II and emigrated to the USA. He married, and had a daughter, Karen. He came across his diary later in life, and began to realize the importance of his childhood work. Over the years, he translated it into English. After his death in 2010, Karen Weiner helped edit the diary with historian Deborah Dwork, and it was published in 2011 as A Boy in Terezín: The Private Diary of Pavel Weiner, April 1944-April 1945.