Among the tens of thousands of Jews sent to the Nazi concentration camp Terezín (or Theresienstadt) were 15,000 children, of whom only 132 are known to have survived the war. Pavel Weiner, a studious, erudite Czech boy, who kept a diary of his experiences in the garrison town turned “model ghetto,” was among them.

It is easy to walk past the ubiquitous plaques in the Czech capital that mark the victims and heroes of World War II and not notice them. But each May, on the anniversary of the Prague Uprising and the end of the war, the city districts that have inherited them — the duty had been in the hands of the Czech Union of Freedom Fighters (ČSBS) — make an effort to bring their memories to life again.

Helen Epstein was not even a year old in the summer of 1948 when her father decided to take his family away from Czechoslovakia for a new life in the US. Having survived the Nazi concentration camps, he was unwilling to endure life under communism. Growing up in New York’s Czech émigré community, Epstein retained close ties to her family’s homeland and is working to get their story told.

The Porrajmos, literally “the Devouring,” is the term the Romani people use to describe the genocidal wave of terror known to most of the world as the Holocaust. Nearly every Romani man, woman and child who survived internment in Czech-run camps later perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau before the notorious Nazi death camp was liberated by the Soviet Army, 67 years ago this Friday.