Comet Boy

The incredible story of the young “poet of Terezín”, Hanuš Hachenburg (1929–1944). Baptiste Cogitore delicately and with great empathy delves into the short, turbulent, yet rich life of a Jewish boy from Prague, who was thrown into a harsh reality even before a malignant ideology began to destroy the world: born in 1929 into a wealthy Jewish family, he was placed in an orphanage by his mother in 1938 for personal reasons. At the age of thirteen, he was deported to the Terezín ghetto and in December 1943 to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he was murdered the day before his fifteenth birthday. Before that, while still in Terezín, he left a profound mark – in one of the ghetto's barracks, forty boys founded the secret magazine Vedem and the “autonomous republic of ŠKID”. Within this group, Hanuš quickly gained a central position as an exceptionally talented poet and writer. Baptiste Cogitore spent ten years researching in archives, gathering information and testimonies from people who knew Hanuš. Based on his research, he made a documentary film about Hanuš, Le Fantôme de Theresienstadt, and then wrote the book The Comet Child (L’enfant comète, 2025) – which, among other things, features Hanuš's immensely powerful poems.