Some sixty kilometers north-west of Prague lies a fortress, built at the end of the 18th century by Emperor Joseph II on the strength of experience of the Prussian-Austrian Wars. He named it Terezín, in honor of his mother, Empress Maria Theresa. About three and a half thousand civilians and approximately as many troops serving in the local garrison lived in Terezín before World War II. During the Nazi occupation, the town’s civilian population had been moved out, and Terezín was turned into a Jewish Ghetto, i.e. a concentration camp for the Jews deported first from the then Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and later also from Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark, Slovakia and Hungary, their number totaling 140,000. Another 15,500 inmates from the Nazi camps, evacuated before the advancing front, kept arriving in the Ghetto at the end of the war. Some 35,000 inmates perished in Terezín, while a mere 3,600 people survived out of the 87,000 prisoners deported from Terezín to the Nazi extermination and labor camps. One of the inmates of the Terezín Ghetto was painter and graphic artist Jan Burka (born in 1924). His recollections help us in learning about the life in the Terezín Ghetto and about the genuine character of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”, as the Nazi euphemistically called their heinous crime, today generally known under the terms the Holocaust or Shoa. At the same time, they commemorate all the fellow prisoners of Jan Burka who did not live to see the liberation of the Ghetto.

Languages: Czech, English and French (all in one book)
Pages: 334
Price: CZK 700,-

(June 23rd, 2009)

Franz Peter Kien was born to a German-speaking Jewish family in Varnsdorf on January 1st, 1919. He would have celebrate his 90th birthday in January 2009. It is a hypothetical question whether he would have really lived that long, but - under ordinary circumstances - he would have surely led an unusually fruitful and active life.

Kien was given only twenty-five years to live. Nevertheless, during that short but very intense life, he succeeded in creating a corpus of admirable works. While in the Terezín ghetto he kept drawing and paintingaway like someone who knows or suspect that his life is hangingby a thread and death is looming ahead. At that time, he signed his works with the Czech version of his name, Petr Kien, to demonstrate his resistance to Hitler's Germany, which inflicted so much injustice and so many crimes upon him - and upon milions of other people. He still wrote his literary works in German, his native language, which is irreplaceable to him as a literary language.

Kien has left behind a body of works whose significance transcends the common criteria applicable to an artist's creativity. He made many drawings and paintings and penned literary works for exceptional value.

On October 16th, 1944, Kien left with his parents and wife for Auschwitz, on his last journey to a place of no return. He died a horrible death, like dozens of thousands of his Terezín fellow prisoners. But the work that has survived him is immortal...

Languages: Czech, English and German
Pages: 238
Price: CZK 800,- (the Czech version), CZK 1.000,- (English or German version)