Dita Kraus

Dita Kraus neé Polach ,was born in Prague. She is one of the few surviving children whose drawings have been miraculously saved in Ghetto Theresienstadt. Some of Dita's childhood pictures are on exhibition at the Prague Jewish Museum.

When the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, they started to persecute Jews. In 1942, when Dita was thirteen years old , she and  her parents were deported to Ghetto Theresienstadt, later to Auschwitz, where Dita's father died.  She and her mother were sent to forced labor in Germany and finally to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. Dita’s mother didn’t survive.

After the war Dita married the author Otto B. Kraus. They emigrated to Israel in 1949, where they both worked as teachers They had three children, Shimon, Michaela and Ron.

Since  Otto’s death  in 2000 , Dita lives alone  in Netanya. She has four grandchildren and four great grandchildren.

    Despite the horrors of the concentration camps, Dita has kept her positive approach to life. She paints delicate watercolors of the colorful wildflowers that grow in Israel. A book called- The Librarian of Auschwitz describe's part of Dita's experience during the Holocaust. Her biography, A Delayed Life, was published by Randon House Penguin