Miroslav kosek biography

Terezin is full of beauty
It's in your eyes now clear
And through the street the tramp
Of many marching feet I hear.

In the ghetto at Terezin,
It looks that way to me,
Is a square kilometer of earth
Cut off from the world that's free

Death, after all, claims everyone,
You find it everywhere.
It catches up with even those
Who wear their noses in the air.

The whole, wide world is ruled
With a certain justice, so
That helps perhaps to sweeten
The poor man's pain and woe

Text by Miroslave Košek

From 1942 to 1945 over 15,000 children passed through Terezin. It soon became a station, a stopping off place, for hundreds of thousands on their way to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. When Terezin was liberated in May 1945, only about one hundred children were alive. Miroslav Kosek (1932–1944) was deported to Terezin at age ten, and died in Auschwitz at age twelve. His poem was later found inside the empty camp alongside other works of art created by the children.

MIROSLAV Kosek, who wrote these lines, was born on March 30th, 1932. He died on October 19th, 1944. He ends his poem, It All Depends How You Look At It, with words which show that while living in the Jewish ghetto of Terezin near Prague, he never understood the enormity of the evil around him:

The whole, wide world is ruled

With a certain justice, so

That helps perhaps to sweeten

The poor man's pain and woe.

Of the 15,000 children who lived in the Terezin ghetto, only 100 survived. The ghetto was established in an old fortress in 1941 as a transit camp on the way to Auschwitz. It was represented to the outside world as a "self governed Jewish settlement area".

In fact, this community so close to death did organise itself carefully, directing most resources towards the children, who it was felt had a better chance of survival; artistic resources as well as food and shelter. The artist Friedl Dicker Brandeis took charge of the art classes, and the children's magnificent art work has survived, though most of the children did not.

A superb exhi

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