With a sober look: Camilla Hirsch’s Diary from Theresienstadt

Ruth Elkabets and Miriam Prager from Israel visited Vienna a few years ago at the invitation of the Jewish Welcome Service. They brought the diary of her great aunt Camilla Hirsch, in which she meticulously described the everyday life and the conditions at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Thanks to the Mandelbaum publishing house, this diary has now been published and presented at the Jewish Museum Vienna in mid November.

“Our misery and suffering became so great,” wrote Camilla Hirsch in one of her journal entries, “that nearly everyone became indifferent to it.” The Vienna resident was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942 at 73 years of age – and survived. Before being deported, she ran a typing office in Vienna.

In her diary, whose publication fulfills the dream of her great niece, Camilla Hirsch provides an authentic, vivid and sober account of the conditions at the concentration camp. The publication is also exceptional, because only a few senior citizens survived the concentration camps and could report from this perspective.