"Then they tattooed me: 71978. I cried a lot. Not because of pain, no; because of the number. I had lost my name and I was only a number. My mother said to me, “Don’t cry, nothing happened. When we get home, you’ll go to dance school and you’ll get a large bracelet, and nobody will see the number.” I never went to dance school and never got the bracelet"
Nina Weil was born in Klattau (in today’s Czech Republic), in 1932. She lived in Prague and was deported to Theresienstadt in 1942. Later
she arrived with her mother Amalie at Auschwitz. She was twelve years old when her 38-year-old mother died of exhaustion there. Nina Weil
survived a “selection” by the camp doctor Josef Mengele and survived a labor camp. After the suppression of the Prague Spring, she and her
husband were granted asylum in Switzerland. She worked in a laboratory at the University Hospital in Zurich.