Abstract
Israel's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon, took into space a reproduction of a picture by a young Czech Jewish artist, Petr Ginz, of the earth seen from the surface of the Moon. Shortly after the explosion of Space Shuttle Columbia, in which Ramon perished with the rest of the crew, a woman saw the picture on her television screen in Prague and let the world know she had Ginz's diaries. Ginz had been deported at fourteen to Terezin and was gassed immediately upon his arrival at Auschwitz two years later: many of his pictures, including the moonscape, are in the art collection of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. His parents were a mixed Jewish-Christian middle-class couple who felt at home in the new republic of Czechoslovakia and shared the liberal ideals of internationalism; they met at an Esperanto convention. Had Petr's parents embraced Zionism, not Czechoslovak patriotism, and studied Hebrew, not Esperanto, they might have escaped to the Land of Israel before the war. Language, homeland, and nation are not atavistic embarrassments for small, embattled peoples. They are the difference between life and death.
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