"With simple means, without any 'title, ' this book should in distant times always be in your memory."

An imprisoned bookbinder wrote these words in a small blank book that he had secretly crafted from pilfered materials at the Terezin (Theresienstadt) concentration camp in September 1944. He presented the album to a fellow prisoner, twenty-one-year-old Marianka Zadikow. Over the next several months, as the Nazis pressed forward with mass deportations from Terezin to Auschwitz, Marianka began to collect inscriptions and sketches from her fellow inmates.

Marianka Zadikow'salbum,...