The Theresienstadt Diaries

A unique Holocaust testimony: Gabriel Dagan's rediscovered Theresienstadt diaries, paired with the novella about Auschwitz and the death march.

One day in the 1940s in Prague, someone knocks on Gabriel Dagan’s door. He opens it and finds a woman standing outside, holding a few thin notebooks in her hands. He recognizes them immediately—they are the diaries he wrote as a teenager during his years in the Theresienstadt concentration camp between 1941 and 1943. Before he was deported to Auschwitz, he asked a friend to take care of the notebooks. They were then passed from prisoner to prisoner as people were transferred, died, or were murdered. Eventually, they came into the possession of the woman who knocked on Gabriel’s door that day. Gabriel survived Auschwitz and eventually moved to Israel. After several years, the diaries found their way to his son, Michael. Along with the diaries, he also left behind a short novel about the death march from Auschwitz.