Jana Renee Friesova was fifteen when she was imprisoned by the Nazis in the Czech ghetto town of Terezin (Theresienstadt). Her memoir unfolds before us the poignantly familiar picture of a young girl who, even under the most abominable circumstances, engages in intense adolescent friendships, worries with her companions over her looks, and falls in love. Raised a Catholic by secular Jewish parents, she did not even know she was a Jew until the German occupation of her country in 1939 when she was twelve.
Whereas Anne Frank s diary ends with deportation to a concentration camp, "Fortress...