We are children just the same

From 1942 to 1944, a group of 13- to 15-year-old Jewish boys secretly produced a weekly magazine called Vedem (In the Lead) at the model concentration camp, Theresienstadt ("Terezin" in Czech). The writers, artists, and editors put together the issues and copied them by hand behind the blackout shades of their cellblock, which they affectionately called the "Republic of Shkid.". The material was saved by one of the handful of boys who survived the Holocaust, but it was suppressed for fifty years in Czechoslovakia. Now, for the first time, these works are being published simultaneously in English, Czech, and German. Vedem is a poignant glimpse at the world of boys torn from their comfortable childhoods, separated from their families, ultimately to perish in the Nazi death machine.