Study Guides
Czechoslovakia
Petr Ginz was born in Prague in 1928 to a mixed Czech-Jewish family. Between 1918 and 1938 Prague was the capital of Czechoslovakia. This period was to be later called the First Czechoslovak republic. Here you can find a map of the interwar Czechoslovak state.
The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
The Munich agreement on 29 September 1938 put an end to the Czechoslovak democracy and deprived the country of a considerable part of its former territory (you can open the map by clicking on its small version on the right side of the website).
Anti-Jewish laws
In the Protectorate anti-Jewish laws, modeled after the racist Nuremberg laws published in Germany in 1935, were enforced very quickly. The first one of the whole range of discriminating decrees was issued on June 21, 1939.
Theresienstadt
Jewish population not only from the Protectorate but also from some other Western European countries (Germany, Austria, Denmark or the Netherlands) were concentrated into Theresienstadt (Terezín in Czech), the fortress town and garrison city in Northern Bohemia, where Germans set up a ghetto in November 1941. All its former inhabitants were forced to move out and make way for the Nazi project that made Terezín a "Jewish town".
Vedem
Petr Ginz was put in heim No.1 in building L 417 of the former Theresienstadt school among boys between 13 and 16 years of age. Valtr Eisinger, their left-oriented warden and teacher was an initiator of the idea of a self-government system that 'his' boys called 'The Republic of Škid' (Škid or SHKID stands for "Dostoevsky School for Social-Labour Education" which existed in the 1920s in Leningrad).