She was a 20-year-old girl who vanished in Auschwitz with her entire family during the Holocaust tragedy.
Hana Kürschnerová was born on 17 March 1924 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, into a Jewish family, daughter of Oskar Kürschner, a dentist, and Růžena Kürschnerová (née Bondyová). Her early life unfolded in a cultured Prague household, shaped by education, family stability, and the growing shadow of political unrest across Europe.
In 1943, Hana and her parents were deported to the Terezín Ghetto, a transit and confinement camp used by Nazi Germany to concentrate Jewish populations from across occupied territories. Life in Terezín was marked by overcrowding, hunger, forced labor, and uncertainty, yet also by attempts to preserve cultural and intellectual life under extreme conditions.
Despite the harsh realities of the ghetto, Oskar Kürschner’s profession as a dentist likely contributed to the family’s temporary survival there. Skilled professionals were sometimes retained longer in Terezín due to administrative and medical needs within the camp system.
On 23 October 1944, Hana and her parents were transported in one of the final deportations from Terezín to the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, part of the larger machinery of the The Holocaust. Historical records indicate they most likely perished shortly after arrival, on 25 October 1944, like so many others from the same transport.
Hana was just 20 years old. Her story stands as a fragment of a much larger history of loss, reminding us that behind each name was a life interrupted—families, professions, and futures erased within a system of industrialized persecution.