Not that Petr was unremarkable. He was multi-talented, his teachers thought the world of him, and when adversity deprived him of everything he had known, this only brought out the inner qualities of his character and his mind. When his neighbors and relatives began to be arrested and deported, he helped old and weak people with their luggage. While his family's life became more and more constricted, and there were more and more prohibitions on everything they wanted to do, he found a refuge in books and traveled the world and beyond in his imagination. As his environment descended into chaos, he learned how to fix things and concentrated on science, which cannot be corrupted by villainy and insanity.

Sixteen years before the launch of the first satellite, 28 years before a man set foot on the moon, Petr tried to imagine what the earth might look like if you're standing on the moon. Based on what he understood about conditions in space, he made a drawing of a moon landscape with jagged rocks, the earth glowing brightly in the dark sky and casting a bright light on the moon rocks. "The hills are so jagged because of earth's huge gravity. That's how they got so pointy," he explained to his sister when he showed her the drawing.

The following year, when Petr was fourteen, he was taken from his home in Prague to the Terezin concentration camp. In the camp, Petr and some of the other boys started a newspaper with the help of a teacher. Of course, it was not allowed for the boys to edit a newspaper, but they managed to publish their one-copy edition every week for two years, until the camp was liberated. The single copy was distributed by being handed from one reader on to the next and by being kept out of sight of the guards. Petr contributed many stories and illustrations to the paper until he was taken to Auschwitz and murdered in 1944.

Now, fast-forward almost sixty years to the first Israeli astronaut ever, crack pilot Ilan Ramon, preparing for his historic space shuttle mission. Ramon, very conscious of his role as the embodiment of Jewish aspirations and accomplishments, asks the holocaust remembrance authority Yad Vashem in Jerusalem for an appropriate relic to take with him into space. Ramon's mother and grandmother had survived the Auschwitz deathcamp, and when a search of the Yad Vashem's archives turns up the teenager's drawing of the moon landscape, it is instantly recognized as the perfect item.

"I feel that my journey fulfills the dream of Petr Ginz 58 years on," Ramon said. "A dream that is ultimate proof of the greatness of the soul of a boy imprisoned within ghetto walls, the walls of which could not conquer his spirit." The Yad Vashem organized a special exhibit showing pictures of Petr, Ilan, and Petr's drawing. "'Moon Landscape' connects the dream of one Jewish boy who is a symbol of the talent lost in the Holocaust, to the journey of one Jewish astronaut, who is a symbol of our revival," the commentary for the exhibit stated.

Czechs were also elated that Petr, who was well known to local historians from his contributions to "Vedem," the Terezin newsletter, was being honored in such a fitting manner. Though Petr had not lived to see man exploring space, his drawing, expressing his confidence in the future and in a return to peaceful pursuits, would accompany his spirit there.

Some stories have just one message, a satisfying ending that illuminates a specific facet of what it means to be human. Some stories are significant in a more difficult way, they do not yield their meaning easily and they mean different things to different people. When Ilan Ramon's mission aboard the space shuttle Columbia abruptly ended in disaster just fifteen minutes before its scheduled completion, it left many people around the world wondering what this meant, trying to extract the lesson. What are we to think, considering that the Columbia and all her crew and cargo were lost on the day on which Petr Ginz would have celebrated his 75th birthday?

And the story does not end there. Almost twenty years ago, a man dismantling an old hen house in the Modrany section of Prague had come across some old books and papers in a drawer. Among them were two notebooks, obviously a child's diary, written in Czech. The man figured out that this was the diary of Petr Ginz, which he had kept from September 1941 to August 1942, just before he was deported to Terezin.

The man never did anything about the diaries until the Columbia disaster. Then he decided to try to return them to Petr's family, and with the help of Yad Vashem, Petr's sister was contacted and agreed to buy the diaries. Petr's sister felt like this was almost like a message from her brother. Now Czech publishing house Trigon has released a book called "My Brother's Diary", a collaboration by Yad Vashem, Petr's sister Chava Pressburger, and the Jewish Museum in Prague. The book contains Petr's diary, family photos, drawings, some of Petr's other writings, some passages from his sister's diary, which she kept while incarcerated in Terezin, and memories his sister wrote for this edition.

The diaries throw an eerie light on the small humiliations and large threats Jews had to endure, and on the ways in which a child can adapt to the most severe circumstances. It is an amazing document. Petr made up stories to help him deal with what was happening to him, like a novel to supplement Jules Verne's fantastic stories, about a group of people in Africa who manufacture a huge reptilian monster for the purpose of conquering and ruling all of Africa. In the camp, he wrote this for his friends:

Was the Columbia's mission futile because the space shuttle was destroyed? Is Ilan Ramon less of a hero because he did not make it back? Does the loss of Petr's drawing invalidate the honor he was meant to be paid? Of course not. We are right when we think of Ramon as a hero who knew the risks involved in his glorious adventure and went anyway. And we are right in honoring Petr Ginz, a regular kid, who showed us that it is possible to become a true hero, an outstanding example for all of us, through nothing more than remaining a decent person and not despairing, something we are all capable of and yet fall short of much too often.