Canned Goods

While I was in Terezin this past December I picked up a copy of We Are Children Just The Same. The book is a collection of essays, poems from and interviews of the children who were interned in Terezin from 1942-1944.

I'm in awe of the childrens' talent and saddened that the majority of them had been sent to their deaths in Auschwitz. One of the boys, Petr Ginz, was only 14 years-old when he was taken from his parents in Prague and sent to Terezin. Yet despite his imprisonment he, along with the other boys who lived in Barracks L417, wrote Vedem--a weekly magazine of stories, poems and illustrations that often depicted the ghetto's hardship or musings of teenagers trapped inside a fortress of darkness and death.

I often wonder what the world would have been like if the Jewish Holocaust never happened. How many gifted people perished who might have made this world a better place.