Helga Hošková-Weissová

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Helga Hošková-Weissová (born November 10, 1929 in Prague ) is a Czech painter of Jewish origin and a Holocaust survivor.

Life

Helga Weiss grew up as an only child in Prague. Her father Otto Weiss had returned home from the First World War as a war invalid and worked as a bank clerk, her mother was a seamstress by trade. After the German defeat of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, her father was dismissed from his position due to the anti-Jewish measures of the German occupation administration.

On December 10, 1941, the family was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto , where their father was separated from them; three years after them, in September 1944, he was taken away in a men's transport and murdered; other relatives were also victims of the Holocaust . Helga Weiss was also separated from her mother and lived in the girls' home L410 in the Theresienstadt ghetto. She kept a diary, and since she was gifted with drawing, she drew the everyday life of the camp around her. When she was transported to Auschwitz in 1944, her two diaries and around one hundred drawings remained in a hiding place in Theresienstadt and were thus preserved. Since the prisoners in the Theresienstadt ghetto were not allowed to take photos, the secretly made drawings are important documentation.

In Auschwitz, she and her mother were at the ramp as able-bodied prisoners selected , shaved and came after ten days as forced laborers in the women's camp of Flossenburg after Freiberg and from there when the war ended still in a death march to the Mauthausen concentration camp , where they almost starved to be liberated on May 5, 1945.

Weissová and her mother moved back into their apartment in Prague. She added to her diaries with her experiences from the weeks after her imprisonment in Theresienstadt. Weissová studied at the Prague School of Applied Arts, among others with Emil Filla, and became an academic painter. She married the double bass player Jiří Hošek, who was employed by the Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra. They have a daughter and son Jiří, who works as a cellist .

In 1957/58 she illustrated the books Noc a naděje (Night and Hope) and Démanty noci (Diamonds of the Night) for Arnošt Lustig . In 1965 she spent ten weeks working at the Ein Hod artists' colony in Israel . The resulting series of images was exhibited in the Jewish Museum in Prague in the spring of 1968 ; a follow-up exhibition in West Berlin was not held after the fall of the Prague Spring . Between 1966 and 1986 she designed the 20 front pages for the Jewish yearbook of the Jewish community in Prague. In the autumn of 1991 she had a large exhibition of her works in the Klausen Synagogue . She carried out an order for a relief at the assembly point of the deportations in Prague's Holešovice district. Since 1998 her children's pictures from Theresienstadt have been honored more and more.

In the 1960s, excerpts from her Theresienstadt diary appeared in an anthology published in Czechoslovakia. The diary was published in 2013 in German and a few other languages.

In 1993 she received an honorary doctorate from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston . In 2009 she received the Josef Hlávka Medal of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and the Medal of Merit of the Czech Republic .

Works

  • Draw what you see . Deutsch - Česky - English. Published by the Lower Saxony Association for the Promotion of Theresienstadt / Terezín e. V. Wallstein, Göttingen 1998, ISBN 978-3-89244-316-2 .
  • Draw what you see Drawings by a child from Theresienstadt , Wallstein, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 3-89244-783-7 .
  • Weiss, Helga: And yet a whole life. A girl who survived Auschwitz (original title Deník , translated by Elke Cermàkovà), Lübbe, Cologne 2013, ISBN 978-3-78572-456-9 .
  • Kathy Kacer: The children from Theresienstadt . With drawings by Helga Weissová (original title: Clara's War , translated by Yvonne Hergane). Ravensburger TB 58188, Ravensburg 2003, ISBN 3-473-58188-7 .
  • Helga Weissová-Hošková. The artistic creation . Edited by the Lower Saxony Association for the Promotion of Theresienstadt / Terezín. Wallstein, Göttingen 2002, ISBN 3-89244-526-5 .
  • Helga Weissová. Exhibition of the Jewish Museum in Prague, October 15 - November 29, 2009 . Text and catalog preparation: Arno Pařík, translation: Stephen Hattersley. Robert Guttmann Gallery, Praha, 2009. Exhibition on the occasion of the 80th birthday (English).
  • Otto Weiss; Helga Weissová: And God saw that it was bad: a story from the Terezín Ghetto . Translated from the Czech by Iris Urwin Lewitová; Scientific supervision by Ruth Bondy. Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 2010 (English).

literature

  • Juliet Gardiner : "We knew it would be worse. But we had no idea." A Czech artist's childhood diary of life in a concentration camp is a moving testimony to courage and endurance , in: Financial Times , March 2, 2013, p. 11
  • Ilka Wonschik: "It was probably a different star we lived on ...": Artists in Theresienstadt . Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2014 ISBN 978-3-95565-026-1
  • Jörn Wendland: The warehouse from picture to picture. Narrative series of images of prisoners from Nazi forced camps . Vienna: Böhlau, 2017, ISBN 978-3-412-50581-3 , p. 207

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kira Cochrane: My diary of a Nazi death camp childhood , The Guardian , February 22, 2013
  2. ↑ Helga Weissová, How my drawings came about. Afterword , in: Kathy Kacer, The Children from Theresienstadt. Ravensburger, Ravensburg 2003, ISBN 978-3-473-58188-7 , p. 224.
  3. ↑ After Nicholas Shakespeare was hampered Weissová in Czechoslovakia from anti-Semitism in their training.
  4. ↑ Medaile Za zásluhy I. stupně in iDNES
personal data
SURNAME Hošková-Weissová, Helga
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Weissová-Hosková, Helga; Weiss, Helga (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czech painter and Holocaust survivor
DATE OF BIRTH November 10, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague