Hodges Library is currently presenting an exhibition focusing on one girl's childhood that was interrupted by the Holocaust.

"In Her Father's Eyes: A Slovak Childhood in the Shadow of the Holocaust" displays various photographs compiled by Béla Weichherz, a Jewish traveling salesman in 1920s Czechoslovakia. The photographs were included in a journal, similar to a baby book that he used to record details of his only daughter Katarina "Kitty" Weichherz. Béla began the journal entries at Kitty's birth in late 1929 but abruptly stopped in the spring of 1942 when the family was transported to a Nazi concentration camp.

The exhibition features an accompanying book, "In Her Father's Eyes: A Childhood Extinguished by the Holocaust," edited and translated by Daniel Magilow, assistant professor of German.

"In his notebooks, Béla recorded anecdotes and details about his daughter's childhood achievements: her first steps, her first words," Magilow said. "He [also] wrote extensively about Kitty's chronic illnesses, her periodic tantrums, and, after she got older, her frustrating tendency to talk back."

The Kitty Weichherz story does not have a happy ending, but that does not mean there is nothing to learn from it.
- Daniel Magilow, associate professor of German

Magilow became involved in the project during his postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. The album had been recently donated to the museum by a woman, Judith Landshut, who lived in Hamburg, Germany. The album consisted of two journals that her great uncle, Béla Weichherz, kept during the 1920s and 1930s.

"The exhibition's goal is to try to make the Holocaust more real by not talking so much about millions of casualties, but instead by telling the story of one anonymous life that will seem quite familiar," Magilow said.

Magilow also pointed out the uncanny parallels between the Kitty Weichherz journal and Anne Frank's diary. Although Kitty Weichherz's journal was written by her father and Anne Frank produced her own personal diary, both girls were born in 1929 and died in concentration camps after living a short life as middle-class Jews in a large central European City, Magilow said.

"In the manuscript of "The Diary of Anne Frank," Anne writes about her budding sexuality and changing body in graphic detail. Edited versions, however, downplay or omit these passages and instead present her in a more saint-like way," Magilow said. "[In the Kitty Weichherz diary] you don't have to go to the manuscript to find her parents discussing her 'negatives' as openly."

In the final 20 pages of the journal Béla's recordings of Kitty's everyday life are soon replaced by anti-Semitism and eventually into a terrifying account of the Weichherz family's deportation and death, Magilow said.

The exhibition was partly funded by UT's Ready for the World program and will run until Dec. 2 on the first floor of Hodges Library.