Stamp honours Jewish 'moon boy'

By Rob Cameron
BBC News, Prague

A copy of the moonscape was destroyed in the shuttle disaster (Picture: Yad Vashem)

A new postage stamp featuring a drawing by a Jewish boy who was murdered at Auschwitz is to be unveiled in Prague on Thursday.

The drawing, by Prague schoolboy Petr Ginz, depicts a view of the Earth as imagined from the Moon.

As a boy, he was obsessed with science and space travel, and drew his now famous Moon Landscape aged 14.

The black-and-white pencil drawing shows mountains on the Moon with the Earth shining far away in the distance.

The artwork was drawn in 1942-1944, when Petr was imprisoned in the Theresienstadt ghetto.

Petr was later sent to Auschwitz and killed. The drawing, now immortalised on a postage stamp, betrays the boy's dreams of escaping the ghetto walls that confined him.

Petr dreamed of going into space (Picture: Yad Vashem)

But there is an extra poignancy to this story. Two years ago, Israel's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon, took a copy of the drawing on board the ill-fated Columbia space shuttle.

Ramon, whose mother survived Auschwitz, was killed when the shuttle exploded on returning to Earth.

The postage stamp is a tribute both to a schoolboy who dreamed of travelling through space and an astronaut whose own dreams ended in tragedy.