Bitter Moon

45 years before man went to the moon, a 16-year-old boy dreamed of what its landscape would be like. Within the confines of a concentration camp, Petr Ginz even brought out a journal that was read by the other boys and girls in secret. That is, until he was taken away to Auschwitz. This is his story

It was the summer of 1944. In the humid state of Ohio, USA, a 14-year-old high school boy shone as a boy scout. More than 8,000 kilometres away, a 16-year-old Czechoslovak saw his last summer in Auschwitz, Poland.
Neil Armstrong probably hadn't even thought about space travel then let alone stepping on the moon but the youngster within the confines of the concentration camp, Petr Ginz, seemed to have had it all figured out.
Petr's sketch, Moon Landscape, a view of the earth from the moon is startlingly accurate despite the fact that the first mission to our satellite took place 25 years after his death in Auschwitz. And his other works of art and writing would have never been seen by the rest of the world if it weren't for another tragedy. On February 1, 2003 (what would have been Petr's 75th birthday), as the Columbia Space Shuttle entered the earth's atmosphere, it disintegrated, killing everyone on board. Among them was India's Kalpana Chawla and, more significant to this story, Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli man to go to space. He had carried with him, as a symbol of the Holocaust, a replica of Petr's black and white Moon Landscape sketch. While the space shuttle has been lost forever, bits and pieces of Petr's life came to the fore since. His personal diaries were discovered by a resident of Prague and were sold to the Holocaust Museum. In 2007, they were printed as a book, The Diary of Petr Ginz.

The Ginzs' was a happy household full of music: Petr's mother, Marie, sang Arias to her children when they were little. But to be born even partly Jewish (Marie was Aryan) spelt doom in Europe during the 1940s. Except that the Nazis came for such families only when the children turned 14. Before he was sent to Theresienstadt, a ghetto for children, Petr spent his days reading every book that caught his eye, recording his life in diaries, penning short stories and planning which sciences to study and how.

And unlike the other Holocaust account through a child's eyes, Anne Frank: The Diary of A Young Girl, Petr's day-to-day-life is recorded in a cryptic manner sometimes laced with dry humour. He speaks of being thrown out of a streetcar for being a Jew on one page with as much nonchalance as he talks of having received mostly A-Grades in his report card in the next.



While his diary accounts turned increasingly nervous as his date to report at Theresienstadt came nearer in 1942, Petr tried to stay positive when he parted from his family. He writes, "Today, I was given a new number, 446. I handed over my suitcases in the optimistic hope that I would see them again someday." At the ghetto, Petr's new identity may have been just a number, but he didn't lose spirit. It was here that he worked on Moon Landscape. He apparently told Chava (his sister, who joined him after turning 14 at the same ghetto. They spent a brief period of time together before he was sent to Auschwitz) that the hills (craters) on the moon were jagged because of the gravity of the earth.

It was also in Theresienstadt that he brought out a magazine, Vedem (We Lead), which the boys and girls at the ghetto would circulate amongst themselves and hide from the guards. In it he once wrote, "They tore us unjustly awayu2026 they did this to destroy us not physically, but spiritually and morally. Will they succeed? Never! Deprived of our former sources of culture, we shall create new ones."

After 1942, Petr's mother never sang again.

A translated extract of one of Petr's poems
And especially the outcast Jew
must give up all habits he knew:
he can't buy clothes, can't buy a shoe,
since dressing well is not his due.