ANN Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl has come to encapsulate childhood under Nazi tyranny. This latest archive to come to light from a young Jewish boy living under the Jackboot in Prague is a more succinct, but no less moving account.

Capturing every facet of life under the Nazis, his diary ends with his summons to Theresienstadt, where he would become the driving force behind the newspaper We Lead.

The young progidy who painted, wrote poetry and several novels died in Auschwitz at the age of 16. And were it not for the Shuttle disaster in Februrary 2003, his diaries might have remained in dusty obscurity. For one of those who died on board was Colonel Ilan Ramon, the son of an Auschwitz survivor. He had taken with him a linoprint, the Moon Landscape by Petr Ginz, to honour the victims of the Holocaust. By a quirk of fate the day the Shuttle blew up would have been Ginz's 75th birthday and in the aftermath of the disaster the drawing became known worldwide. It inspired a resident of Prague to have another look at six yellowed notebooks and sheets of paper he found in house he had been living for 50 years. It was Ginz's diary and an unfinished novel.

The diary show a precocious mind with a fine attention to detail. It includes secret writing referring to Allied bomb attacks. He recounts the assassination of Nazi chief Heidrich and the wave of executions that followed, as flags throughout the capital were flown halfmast.

Ginz is fully aware of the transports of Jews to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, which he notes with increasing regularity before he himself is summonsed.

This book, illustrated with Ginz's linoleum cuts and photographs, is a fitting tribute to a life cut cruelly short.