Dita Kraus

Dita Kraus ( 1929 , Prague ) is a survivor of Nazi concentration camps. In the book of Antonio G Iturbe is called Dita Alderova. ¹

Biography

She was born in Prague and lived there until the age of 9, when the Nazi invasion of the city forced her to move. At the age of twelve she was transferred to Terezín , to the concentration camp of Theresienstadt ² and was later deported in 1943 to Auschwitz . ³ There he met Fredy Hirsch, a Jew who organized a children’s school in the BIIb family camp of Auschwitz II-Birkenau, which included a clandestine library of only eight books. Dita was in charge of guarding and hiding those eight books so that the Nazis did not discover them. In 1944, 3,000 family camp prisoners were killed in the gas chambers, including many school children and Fredy Hirsch (who died hours earlier because of an overdose of painkillers).

In 1944 Dita was taken to the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen , and then liberated by Allied forces in 1945.

At Auschwitz he met writer Otto Kraus (Ota Kraus) whom he married in 1947. In 1949 the couple and their son Peter-Martin moved to Israel. In 1951 was born his daughter Michaela and in 1957 Ronny. Ota died on October 5, 2000.

Mrs Kraus lives in Israel.

Spanish journalist and writer Antonio G. Iturbe has told his story in the novel The Librarian of Auschwitz ⁴

Bibliography

• Antonio Iturbe; The librarian of Auschwitz , 2012 ^{5 6}

References