Lea Deutsch (F / Croatia, 1927-1943), Holocaust victim
Lea Deutsch (F / Croatia, 1927-1943), Holocaust victim.
- KEYWORDS : <Croatia> <Deportation>
Biography
Born in 1927 in Zagreb to Croatian Jewish parent, Lea Deutsch was considered an acting miracle from a child between the two wars in Zagreb. She acted, sang and danced in crowded theaters. She played her first role in the Zagreb HNK in 1932 at the age of five, and the last in 1941, twenty days before the proclamation of the Independent State of Croatia. In those 10 years, she played 17 roles, and was so popular that theaters commissioned pieces that were specifically written for her. She was an actress who went to the theater, about whom all the Zagreb newspapers wrote, who often performed on the radio... All this did not help her survive the war. Neither the interventions of her theatrical friends nor the Jewish attempts to move her to Palestine helped. Immediately after the establishment of the Ustasha state, the girl was expelled from the theater, shortly afterwards from school, and in 1943, when she was only 16, she was arrested, along with her younger brother and mother, and sent to Auschwitz. She died in the carriage, before she arrived at the camp.
Book : Lea Deutsch, by Pavao Cindrić (2008
- Pavao Cindrić, Lea Deutsch--zagrebačka Anne Frank: biografija (Zagreb: PROFIL, 2008).
Lea Deutsch grows up as the Croatian Anne Frank. Lea was an actress whom the whole of Zagreb knew and loved (the more terrible her area is, because few who tried to help her failed), and Anne Frank wrote her diary. Lea was at the same age as Anne Frank at the time of her death, and her fate, like Anna’s, became a symbol of the terrible tragedy of the Jewish people.
The book's author Pavao Cindrić (Slavonski Brod 1929-Zagreb, 1998) graduated from the Acting School in Novi Sad, the Higher Pedagogical School in Zagreb and graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb. From 1955 to 1980 he worked at the Croatian National Theater in Zagreb as a lecturer in Drama and Opera and head of the Archives. In 1980, as a writer and publicist, he became a freelance artist and continued to write books, work as a publicist and is a regular contributor to Croatian Television. In addition to his literary work, he also translated, mainly dramatic and opera texts, and wrote screenplays for documentaries and documentary series. He was mainly involved in theater, Zagreb's cultural history, film and biographies of Croatian cultural workers and artists.