Monday, April 8, 2019 was a red-letter day for the Terezín Memorial. It welcomed the American astronaut Andrew Feustel with his wife Indira, accompanied by Mrs. Eva Zažímalová, President of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The distinguished American guest came to present to Mr. Jan Roubínek, Director of the Terezín Memorial, a copy of the drawing made by Petr Ginz, depicting A View of Planet Earth from the Moon.
Andrew Feustel had taken a copy of the above-mentioned drawing with him in 2018 for his hitherto last space mission (he regularly carries in his spacecraft artifacts associated with the Czech Republic since his wife Indira is known to have Czech roots).
Mr. Pavel Suchan of the Czech Academy of Sciences who moderated a press conference held on this occasion in the Ghetto Museum, later wrote in his blog, when describing the presentation of the drawing: You just have to imagine you are 14, and you have no idea, well, he actually seemed to have some notion of how a view of the Earth from the Moon might look like, and you just go and try to depict it. And he did, 15 years before the first artificial satellite was launched from the Earth… The picture reflects Petr´s penchant for science and fantasy stories, duly mirroring his vivid imagination and visionary mind.
A copy of this particular drawing travelled to outer space already in 2003, with the first Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon. Unfortunately, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon reentering the Earth´s atmosphere. This happened on February 1, 2003. As a matter of coincidence, Petr Ginz would have celebrated his 75th birthday on that unhappy day. Andrew Feustel then took over an imaginary relay, which was crowned with the recent return of the picture to Terezín. The original drawing is kept in the memorial Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
A copy of this picture Moon Landscape will be put on display at the Ghetto Museum along with the Certificate of Authenticity confirming the presence of this copy in the space.
Mr. and Mrs. Feustel with their accompaniment also went for a sightseeing tour of the Terezín Memorial´s exhibitions and visited its archives where they leafed through the pages of the wartime magazine Vedem of whom Petr was an editor and which has been preserved in the local archives.
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