Lea Deutsch

In 2011 Croatian director Branko Ivanda made a film Lea and Darija, about Deutsch.

In 2003, a Lauder Jewish elementary school in Zagreb was named after her.

In an attempt to save his family, Deutsch's father converted his family to Catholicism in June 1941. On 5 May 1943 Heinrich Himmler visited Zagreb. During his visit he pressed NDH leader Ante Pavelić to enact the "Final Solution" in his territory. In the coming days, Croatian and German officials began detaining the heads of the Jewish community in Zagreb and any remaining Jews who had been allowed to stay in the city up until that point.

In May 1943, Deutsch, her mother and her brother were deported to Auschwitz by the Nazis. Out of 75 prisoners during the six-day journey in the cattle wagon, without food and water, 25 did not survive. Lea Deutsch was among them, her heart having been weakened by diphtheria in her childhood. Her mother and brother were killed in Auschwitz. Her father, Stjepan, managed to save himself, hiding as a patient who suffered from infectious ocular trachoma at the ward of an ophthalmologist, Dr Vilko Panac, in the Sisters of Charity Hospital, Zagreb. Stjepan Deutsch survived the Holocaust and lived until 1959. He was buried in the Jewish part of the Mirogoj Cemetery, with Lea's photo on his tombstone.

In 1941 NDH began the implementation of race laws which prevented Deutsch from acting. Immediately after the establishment of the NDH she was banned from the theater where she performed and a little later from a school that she attended. Deutsch's schoolmate Relja Bašić recalls, "She used to sit motionless on a bench across from the theater in a little herringbone pattern coat with a yellow star of David on her sleeves, staring for hours at the building where once she was a star, and now she couldn't even enter the building."

Lea Deutsch (Croatian pronunciation: [lêa dâjtʃ]; 18 March 1927 – May 1943) was a Croatian Jewish child actress who was murdered in the Holocaust.