2003 Holocaust-era Moon Landscape reproduction perishes with Israeli Astronaut
Moon Landscape
      Israel’s first-ever astronaut, Colonel Ilan Ramon, was launched into space, together with six other astronauts, on 16 January 2003 and died on reentry to the Earth's atmosphere on 01 February 2003 with a reproduction of Holocaust-era art from Yad Vashem’s Art Museum.
      Ilan Ramon, a colonel in the Israeli Air Force, contacted Yad Vashem requesting a Holocaust related item to take with him on his launch into space on the shuttle Columbia, due to the significance of the Holocaust to him as a Jew and as an Israeli. On a personal level, the Holocaust is even more meaningful to Ramon as his mother is an Auschwitz survivor, and his grandfather and other members of his family perished in the death camps.
      Yad Vashem chose Moon Landscape, drawn by Petr Ginz, a Jewish boy born in 1928 in Prague, during his incarceration in the children's home of the Theresienstadt ghetto. Petr Ginz was multi-talented and had, at a young age, already written stories, articles and poetry, and continued to do so after being sent to the ghetto in 1942. During his incarceration Ginz traveled to places near and far within the depths of his imagination, and with great longing, he visited Prague in a poem written from behind the ghetto walls. In the fall of 1944 Ginz was killed in the Auschwitz Nazi death camp
      The moon landscape depicted in Petr Ginz’s small drawing attests to his aspiration to reach a place from where the earth, which threatened his life, could be seen from a secure range. Even more so, the picture reveals a young man who, in addition to his other talents, was both a researcher and scientist full of optimism that science precedes all and would ultimately bring a remedy for humanity.
      During his astronaut training, Ilan Ramon said: “I feel that my journey fulfills the dream of Petr Ginz 58 years on. A dream that is ultimate proof of the greatness of the soul of a boy imprisoned within the ghetto walls, the walls of which could not conquer his spirit. Ginz’s drawings, stored at Yad Vashem, are a testimony to the triumph of the spirit.”
     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 life was lost as he was becoming a symbol of Israel's revival.
Colonel Ilan Ramon
Petr Ginz

Theresienstadt watercolors by Petr Ginz
Living Quarters
Street

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