International Red Cross and Red Crescent
Museum
International Red Cross and Red Crescent
Museum

Talk and book signing with Hélios Azoulay

"Pour Tommy, 22 janvier 1944"


As part of our Community Sunday on 4 June, we are pleased to welcome the composer, clarinettist, writer and actor Hélios Azoulay, author of Pour Tommy, 22 janvier 1944.

In order to present this "little book which is like a miracle" (Le Monde) and to discuss it, we are organising a round table in collaboration with the Licra-Genève. It will be introduced by Pascal Hufschmid, General Director of the Museum, and followed by a signing session.

 

Round table on 4 June 2023 at 3.30 pm, with:

  • Hélios Azoulay, artist and writer, author of Pour Tommy
  • Carole Fumeaux, secretary general of the Licra-Geneva
  • David Haas, son of Tommy
  • Romaine Jean, journalist and lecturer (moderation)
  • Daniel Palmieri, ICRC historian

 

About the book

Terezín, 22 January 1944. Tommy is three years old. For his birthday, his father, the painter Bedřich Fritta, gives him a book that he has drawn himself. A story just for him. 52 small watercolours sublime in their beauty, delicacy and humour. And there is so much tenderness, so much poetry in this last gift from a father to his son that it seems inconceivable that it could have been born in a camp, at the hands of a man surrounded like all his family by terror and death. The father was deported to Auschwitz. The child survived. Dialoguing through time, the writer Hélios Azoulay tells the story of Tommy, of his book, of this heritage. These are pages of striking depth, from which one emerges dazed and shaken.

Mathias Filipini © Editions du Rocher
Portrait of Hélios Azoulay
Pour Tommy - Bedrich Fritta & Hélios Azoulay
Daily life in Theresienstadt (1943-1944) - Bedrich Fritta ©The estate of Bedrich Fritta
Tommy might become a famous detective (Bedrich Fritta, Hélios Azoulay, Editions du Rocher)

Nothing to discover