Hana Brady (Hana "Hanička" Bradyová) (16 May 1931 in Nové Město na Moravě – 23 October 1944 in Auschwitz, Poland) was a 13-year old Jewish girl murdered in the Holocaust. She is the subject of the 2002 non-fiction children's book Hana's Suitcase, written by Karen Levine.
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Hana Brady was born in Nové Mesto, Czechoslovakia on May 16, 1931. She and her older brother George watched their parents being arrested and taken away by the Nazis. They were never seen again. Hana and George were sent to the Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp. In 1944, Hana was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. While her brother survived by working as a labourer, Hana was sent to the gas chambers a few hours after her arrival on 23 October 1944.
The story of Hana Brady first became public when Fumiko Ishioka （石岡史子 Ishioka Fumiko）, a Japanese educator and director of the Japanese non-profit Tokyo Holocaust Education Resource Center exhibited Hana's suitcase in 2000 as a relic of the concentration camp. Visiting Auschwitz in 1999, Ishioka requested a loan of children's items, things that would convey the story of the Holocaust to other children.
I went to Auschwitz in 1999 and asked for a loan of some children's items. I specifically asked [for] a shoe, this little shoe, and I asked for a suitcase. A suitcase – that really tells you a story of how children, who used to live happily with their family, were transported and were allowed to take only one suitcase. [The suitcase] shows this journey. I thought an object like a suitcase would be a very important item to let children in Japan learn what happened to children in the Holocaust.
—Fumiko Ishioka
The suitcase turned out to be a very capable means of telling the story of the Holocaust, reaching out to children at their level.
In Japan, the Holocaust is so far away. Some people don't see any connection whatsoever. But when they look at the suitcase, these children were really shocked. 'She was my age.' That really helped them a lot, to focus on this one little life that was lost. They could really relate her to themselves and try to think of why such a thing could happen to a girl like her. Why the Jewish people? And why children? They then realized there were one and a half million children. —Fumiko Ishioka
The suitcase has large writing on it, a name and birthdate and the German word, Waisenkind (orphan). Ishioka began painstakingly researching Hana's life and eventually found her surviving brother in Canada. The story of Hana Brady and how her suitcase led Ishioka to Toronto became the subject of a CBC documentary. The producer of that documentary, Karen Levine was urged to turn the story into a book by a friend who was a publisher and whose parents were Holocaust survivors. Said Levine, "I first read about Hana’s suitcase in December 2000. I read about Hana’s suitcase in The Canadian Jewish News. My heart started to beat. I fell in love with the story instantly. This was a different kind of Holocaust story. It had at its centre a terrible sadness, one we all know too well. But it had a modern layer to it that lifted it up, that had connection, and even redemption."
A while later, it was discovered that the present suitcase happened to not truly belong to Hana. The true suitcase had been taken to a museum, which was burnt down, supposedly by Neo-Nazis.
The 2002 book became a bestseller and received the Bank Street College of Education Flora Stieglitz Straus Award for non-fiction, the National Jewish Book Award, and several other Canadian awards for children's literature. The book received a nomination for the Governor General's Award and was selected as a final award candidate for the Norma Fleck award. It has been translated into over 20 languages and published around the world.
In October 2006, the book won the Yad Vashem award, presented to George Brady at a ceremony in Jerusalem.
A play based on the book was written Emil Sher. A film, Inside Hana's Suitcase, appeared in 2009. The suitcase featured in the CBC documentary was not the original but a replica. The real suitcase, on loan, was destroyed by neo-Nazi hooligans who set fire to a warehouse in Birmingham, England, in 2005.
In 2010, a Hebrew version of the play was staged by the Nephesh Theater in Holon, Israel.
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