Upstander Profile-Paul Weiner

Name: Pavel (Paul) Weiner

DOB: November 13^th, 1931

DOD (date of death): January 17^th, 2010

Age: 78

Pavel Edgar Weiner was born in November 13, 1931 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. He had one brother named Jan (Hanus being the diminutive for Jan in Czech, but also called “Handa” in his diary) Weiner. He was the youngest and Jan unfortunately perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau in1945 and his father in 1944. In May of 1942, when Pavel was only ten years of age, he and his family were deported to the Terezin Ghetto. He began his diary when he was only twelve years of age. Pavel wrote a diary when he was imprisoned in the Terezin Ghetto (the same ghetto as Petr Ginz and later people you will read about in later chapters). He was an innocent Jewish boy that had to witness such atrocities in the Terezin Ghetto. His mother, however, survived the Ghetto and the two of them immigrated to Canada and then the USA in 1950, where he eventually changed his name to Paul (Pavel, being the Czech version of Paul). He married in 1967, and had a daughter, who is a teacher. He forgot about his diary, until in 1979, when he was helping his mother move from Washington DC to NY. How did something as vital as a diary be lost? He soon donated the diary to the USHMM and a photograph. He did learn some of the English language in school while in the Terezin Ghetto, but he never practiced the language much. He wrote his diary during his last year in Terezin (from 1944 - 1945, when the camp was liberated). No one really knew how he obtained the diary, only that he might have tried to get hands on paper, due to the very limited amount of paper and pens in the Ghetto, but no one really knew how he obtained it. He even submitted a page of testimony for his late brother, Jan. Unfortunately, he passed away in January 2010, at the age of 78. He was a loving father and son.