Petr Ginz (1 February 1928 – 28 September 1944) was a Czechoslovak boy of partial Jewish background who was deported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto (known as Terezín, in Czech) during the Holocaust.

The novels, including Návštěva z pravěku (English: Visit from Prehistory), were written in the style of Jules Verne[2] and illustrated with his own paintings.

According to the anti-Jewish laws of the Third Reich, children from mixed marriages were to be deported to a concentration camp at the age of 14.

It was published in Spanish, Catalan, and Esperanto, as well as the original Czech, and in English in April 2007 as The Diary of Petr Ginz 1941–1942.

Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, whose mother and grandmother were survivors of Auschwitz, was asked by S. Isaac Mekel, director of development at the American Society for Yad Vashem, to take an item from Yad Vashem onto the American Space Shuttle Columbia.

The shuttle, while reentering Earth's atmosphere, broke apart on 1 February 2003,[5] destroying the copy of Ginz's drawing on what would have been his 75th birthday.

In 2018, 15 years after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, another copy was given by Yad Vashem to Ilan's widow, Rona, to give to astronaut Andrew Feustel.

Feustel's video message commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah) 2018/5778 featured the astronaut displaying Ginz's depiction of a view of Earth from the Moon.

[6][7][8] On February 1, 2020, Feustel gifted one of the copies of “Moon Landscape” brought to space to the Czech Center Museum Houston.