Hana Brady

Hana Brady (real name Hana "Hanička" Bradyová , May 16, 1931 in Nové Město na Moravě , Czechoslovakia - October 23, 1944 in Auschwitz-Birkenau ) was a Czech Jewish girl who fell victim to National Socialism . Her life story is the basis for the youth book Hana's suitcase .

Life

Hana Brady was born in 1931 to Karel Brady-Metzl and Markéta Brady. Hana's parents and their three-year-old brother Jiří (1928 - 2019) owned a shop in Nové Město. The family lived above the business premises and the children sometimes helped out in the shop. They were the only Jewish children in town, but that fact was not of great concern to anyone before World War II . Hana is described by surviving school friends as a friendly and helpful girl.

After the annexation of Austria and the Sudeten areas , the German Wehrmacht occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939. From then on, the life of the Jews was restricted by National Socialist laws. You were allowed to z. B. stopped going to the cinema and had to wear a Jewish star from autumn 1941 .

In March 1941, Hana's mother, Markéta, was arrested by the Gestapo . On November 23, 1941, Hana's father Karel was also arrested. Hours after the father's arrest, his uncle Ludvík took the children Hana and Jiří to live with him. He was a Catholic and had married his father's sister. Now he decided that the children should go into hiding with him and his family in the country. The children learned through letters from their father that he was being held in Iglau in the Gestapo prison.

The uncle and aunt of the two children had to follow an order and take Hana and Jiří to the Třebíč deportation center on May 14, 1942 . A short time later, the children were taken to Theresienstadt with other people , where Brady painted several pictures. These have been preserved, as has her case. When the siblings had already been in the ghetto for a year, their grandmother also came to Theresienstadt from Prague. She was seriously ill when the children came to see her. She passed away three months later, in September 1944.

At some point, Hana discovered her brother's name on the transport list to the east. At first she lost her courage, but when she discovered her name on a transport list four weeks later, she was happy because she believed she would now see her brother again. The journey in the cattle wagons took a day and a night. On the night of October 23, 1944, Hana Brady arrived with the other girls in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Thirteen-year-old Hana was put on the gas by the German SS men on the day of her arrival .

Hana's suitcase

After the war, Hana's suitcase was sent from Auschwitz to Japan, where it was exhibited at the Tokyo Holocaust Educational Resource Center in 2000 . A group called “Little Wings”, consisting of children and adolescents aged 8 to 18 years, reconstructed Hana Brady's life story with their leader Fumiko Ishioka (石 岡 史 子Ishioka Fumiko ). They also tracked down Hana's brother, who survived Auschwitz and lived as George Brady in Toronto, Canada . He traveled to the "Little Wings" in Japan and told his story and Hana's story there.

Hana Brady's story was made known through a radio program and various texts in Canada and Japan. The author Karen Levine processed the story in her book Hana's suitcase . The book became a bestseller and received the Bank Street College of Education Flora Stieglitz Straus Award as a factual novel. It was also awarded the Governor General's Award for Literary Merit in 2002 and received a nomination for the Norma Fleck Award. In 2009 the book was filmed under the title Inside Hana's Suitcase . The book has been translated into many languages. As a literary work, like Anne Frank's diary, it is part of the canon of youth literature on the Holocaust .

Four years later, George Brady's daughter, Lara Hana Brady, discovered that the suitcase on display around the world was not real. It looked a little different and, above all, was much better preserved than the one in the pictures in the museum in Auschwitz . When asked about this fact, the museum replied that Hana's suitcase, along with other exhibits, was destroyed in a fire at an exhibition in Birmingham in 1984. A replica was then made on the basis of the inventory photos, which the museum later loaned to Japan.

literature

• Karen Levine: Hana's Suitcase: The Story of Hana Brady . From the Canadian English by Mirjam Pressler . Ravensburger Buchverlag, Ravensburg 2006, ISBN 978-3-473-52308-5 (recommended age: from 10 years).

Web links

• Lars von Törne: Holocaust: The horror of Auschwitz in a suitcase , Die Zeit , April 4, 2013
• Martina Schneibergová: Hana Brady was not forgotten in Nove Mesto na Morave , Radio Praha , July 30, 2005
• Katrin Bock: Hana's case , Radio Praha, November 22, 2003
• Hana's story , Brady family official website

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lenka Kalášková: Rodina Brady - Metzl ( Memento of the original from October 31, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , in: Davidova hvězda zářila u nás, v Novém Městě na Moravě , Czech Jewish Museum in Prague 
2. ↑ Review notes on Hana's suitcase. The story of Hana Brady at perlentaucher.de
3. ^ Karen Whaley: Hana Brady: The new Anne Frank? , Torontoist , March 16, 2006
4. ↑ Katharina Bauer: Representations of the Holocaust in Recent Youth Literature. In: Reinhard Ibler (Ed.): The Holocaust in the Central European literatures and cultures since 1989 = The Holocaust in the Central European literatures and cultures since 1989. Literature and Culture in Central and Eastern Europe Vol. 5, Ibidem-Verlag, Stuttgart 2014 , ISBN 978-3-8382-0512-0 , pp. 69-85; limited preview in Google Book search.
5. ↑ Hana's suitcase turns out to be a replica. The Auschwitz Museum admits the original suitcase was destroyed in a fire. CBC. April 6, 2004.