Dita Kraus

Dita Kraus was born Edith Polakova to a secular Jewish family in Prague, Czechoslovakia. She was the only child of Hans Polak, a law professor, and his wife Elisabeth. It was when the Nazis invaded her country in 1939, shortly before the start of World War II, and persecuted Jews, that Dita really understood she was Jewish. Her father lost his job and the family were evicted from their apartment. In 1942, when Dita was 13 years old, she and her parents were deported to the Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp and then in 1943 to the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where her father died. She was sent to the Kinderblock (children's block), where Freddy Hirsch, a young teacher whom she had known in Prague, asked her to take charge of the few precious, forbidden books in the camp. He was murdered in 1944. She and her mother were sent to a forced labor camp in Hamburg, Germany, then to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. They survived to be liberated by British troops, but her mother died two months later. After the war, Dita married Otto B. Kraus, a novelist, with whom she would have three children. In 1949, they emigrated to Israel, where they both became English teachers. The novel called The Librarian of Auschwitz by Spanish writer Antonio Iturbe described part of Dita's experience during the Holocaust. Her own autobiography, A Delayed Life, was published in 2020. Some of her childhood drawings in Theresienstadt were preserved and are on exhibition at the Prague Jewish Museum.