The Girls of Room 28

by Hannelore Brenner

  The finale of the children’s opera Brundibár. This still is from the infamous Nazi propaganda film about Theresienstadt directed by Kurt Gerron (1944),

  unofficially dubbed The Führer Gives the Jews a City.

  “When I think of those truly evil years of the war and the Holocaust, one bright, shining point of light always emerges in my memory—our Children’s Home in the ghetto, our Room 28,” recalls Eva Landa. “I was in Theresienstadt for eighteen months. That isn’t long in the life of an adult, but in the life of a twelve-year-old, it is practically an eternity.

  “I came to Theresienstadt in 1942, when I was eleven. By the time I left the ghetto on a transport to Auschwitz in December 1943, I felt almost grown up. Parting from Theresienstadt was very hard for me. I left behind my friends and the community we had fashioned with so much care. However, I took with me the memories of our striving for a better and more just world. I did my best to be brave and not to betray our ideals.

  “Our little community helped me to overcome many hardships. Sadly, only fifteen girls from Room 28 were fortunate enough to survive. In the Theresienstadt Hymn,’ we all sang: ‘If you wish, you will succeed, hand in hand we’ll be as one, on the ghetto ruins we’ll all laugh one day’. These prophecies never came true. No one could laugh on those ruins. But we who survived remember our childhood in Room 28 of the children’s home at Theresienstadt with a gentle smile.”

  “How did we handle it?” Judith Schwarzbart wonders. “How did we manage to get along and help one another—about thirty girls at that difficult age between twelve and fourteen? Why did we voluntarily attend to our studies? How did we keep our room clean and our hair washed under such trying circumstances? I now realize that our counselor Tella pulled off a miracle, as did the other counselors.”

  “They were like second mothers to us,” Flaška says. “Room 28 was a little island that protected us and made it easier for us to bear the loss of our homes—and in many cases, the separation from one or both parents.”

  The adults who were responsible for caring for the children did everything they could to create a refuge for them. “We wanted to make a home for our youngsters, a place where they were taken seriously, where they were allowed to be young, where they weren’t constantly confronted with the major issues of the day,” Fredy Hirsch, the legendary Zionist youth leader, wrote in mid-1943, one year after the children’s homes were established. “We wanted to give them a reasonably lovely place to call home in the midst of misery piled upon misery.”3

  No one could have predicted what lay ahead for the prisoners in Theresienstadt. They could only hope that they would survive until the war was over, and in the meantime try to prepare for that day, both physically and mentally. “Over the last year and a half we have seen traditionally inviolable notions of human society reevaluated in a way that many of us do not understand,” Fredy wrote. “In this world we built Children’s Homes. The attempt had to be made to rescue children from the devaluation of what is good.” And he concluded with these words: “I believe that someday these children will look back fondly on the home that we tried to provide for them in Theresienstadt. How terrible it would be if Theresienstadt were to represent an irrevocable spiritual and physical defeat for our youth.”4

  It is horrifying to contemplate that the lives of most of the children of Theresienstadt ended in the gas chambers of Auschwitz; still, it is comforting to know that Fredy Hirsch’s hopes found fulfillment in the lives of those children who survived.

  “It was truly a privilege to live in the Girls’ Home, L 410,” Marianne Rosenzweig writes. “I consider the time I spent in Room 28 the best time in Theresienstadt. Although we were young, and although hunger, cold, and fear defined our lives, we remained honest and decent and always had high moral values. And we developed very deep friendships of the sort that would have scarcely been possible under normal circumstances.”

  “I believe that Room 28 made me a tolerant person capable of forming friendships with a wide range of people,” says Handa Pollak. “We lived in a little room with about thirty children, and we all came from very different backgrounds. Some were spoiled, some were quarrelsome, some egotistic, some good, and some less so—but that’s how life is. Everyone has a different character. And we learned to get along, to listen to one another. We learned to live together—because there was no other choice.”

  Flaška’s album contains the following words, which were written in farewell by Margit Mühlstein, a social worker in the Girls’ Home. They would become Flaška’s guiding principle in all her actions: “Our years in Theresienstadt will have been for nothing if we ever oppress so much as a single person in our own lives.”

  It seems as though there was no other place in those days where education was taken more seriously and where pedagogical ideas and goals were put into practice with more determination than in Theresienstadt. Part of the reason was, of course, the unique situation that had forcibly confined almost the entire Jewish population of a nation, including its intellectual elite (artists, teachers, scientists, Zionist activists). The key to this educational success was the combined effort of adults who valued the children’s well-being over their own lives. Among them were Fredy Hirsch, Walter Eisinger, Rudi Freudenfeld, Ilse Weber, Kamilla Rosenbaum, Ella Pollak, and the Viennese artist and art instructor Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, from whose classes at Theresienstadt more than three thousand children’s drawings were saved.

  “There is a certain irony of fate,” writes historian Livia Rothkirchen, “in the fact that the coerced society of Theresienstadt struck the final chord in a life shared by three ethnic elements—the Czech, German, and Jewish communities—that had influenced and enriched one another on Bohemian soil for several centuries and that had played a significant role in the development of the culture of European thought. … Wrenched from the nourishing soil of their homelands and placed in the most difficult circumstances, Czech and German Jews, generally thought to be assimilated and incapable of defending themselves against the Nazis, found their way back to their own human and spiritual values in Theresienstadt, of all places.”5

  What remains are the works of those who contributed to the unique cultural milieu of Theresienstadt, to striking this last chord in so resounding a fashion that even today, some sixty years later, its echo can still be heard in the works of musicians and composers such as Viktor Ullmann, Gideon Klein, Hans Krása, Pavel Haas, Rafael Schächter, and Karel Ančerl; in the works of artists such as Otto Ungar, Leo Haas, Bedřich Fritta, Peter Kien, Karel Fleischmann, and Alfred Kantor; in the cabaret songs and poems of Karel Švenk, Leo Strauss, and Walter Lindenbaum. And it is captured in unforgettable performances—of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem and of Hans Krása’s children’s opera, Brundibár—which embody the essence of the culture of Theresienstadt.

  Those who were children at the time could not possibly have fathomed the almost superhuman determination needed to create this cultural environment. Still, many of them would surely have grasped the meaning of Viktor Ullmann’s words: “I must emphasize that in no sense did we sit weeping by the rivers of Babylon, but, instead, our will to create culture matched our will to live.” But to understand what extraordinary powers these adults had to summon to realize these outstanding achievements while gazing into the abyss—this was most certainly beyond the realm of a child’s comprehension.

  Only years later would they be able to make sense of an old parable that was known among some of the ghetto inmates: The inhabitants of a valley are told that within two days their hometown will be flooded by a natural catastrophe. There is no escape. No chance to be rescued. So the rabbi calls his faithful to the synagogue and tells them: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we have exactly forty-eight hours to learn how to live under water.’ ”

  This book recounts these “forty-eight hours.” While enduring unimaginable suffering, the children of Theresienstadt also studied, played, danced, sang, did gymnastics, created art, wrote poems, and appeared in theatrical
productions. This is why many of those who survived, particularly those whose road to survival also took them through the death camps, remember Theresienstadt as a last instance of humanity, a place where there was still love, education, art, and culture.

  The renowned musician and conductor Karel Ančerl, one of the few musicians in Theresienstadt who survived the Holocaust, wrote in his memoirs: “Yes, the Nazis almost succeeded in exterminating the Jews. However, they did not succeed in exterminating the idea of the human dimension of humanity.”6

  Abraham Weingarten, Hanka’s husband, captured the spirit of this book when he said to me in Spindlermühle: “We are witnesses to a miracle. Everyone here, apart from you and me, experienced the Holocaust firsthand and survived. Those girls are now grandmothers. Each has a unique personality, temperament, and outlook, and each has traveled a different road. But despite all these differences and despite the scars that life has left on them, just look at how cheerful they all are, how they laugh and sing, how happy they are here together. Life has proved stronger. Isn’t that a miracle?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Saying Goodbye

  One day in late August 1938, a little brown-haired girl stood frozen in place on the balcony of an old apartment house in a desolate neighborhood of the Moravian capital city of Brno, her gaze fixed on a figure that was slowly walking away. Her eyes remained riveted to the spot long after the figure had vanished from sight. After what seemed an eternity, time that is etched into her memory, she went back inside, into a large dim room in a musty old building that now served as a boardinghouse. Sobbing, she buried herself in one of the empty beds in the deserted room. Her world was falling apart.

  Helga Pollak was eight years old when she left Vienna and became a stranger in a strange land, when her childhood came to an end in an inhospitable boardinghouse in Brno, when she said goodbye to her mother, unaware that more than eight years would elapse before they would be reunited. Czechoslovakia (as it was called then) was still a country at peace. To Helga’s mind, the ever-increasing persecution of Jews that she had experienced in Vienna was not a serious danger, or at least not a life-threatening one. She was only vaguely aware of the fact that she was Jewish.

  More than sixty years later, these images live on in Helga Pollak’s memory. “At the end of August, my mother, who had come from Vienna to Kyjov, where I was spending the summer, brought me to a boardinghouse in Brno. I can still see her walking away. I was standing on a balcony, watching her go. I wept.

  Helga Pollak, circa 1941

  No one in that gloomy boardinghouse paid any attention to me. The young women who were living there like me, in a sublet room containing four or five beds, were, I suppose, working somewhere or attending classes. They all spoke Czech. The only person who was around during the morning was a maid from the countryside, but she didn’t speak to me, either. How could she have? I didn’t speak Czech back then, and she didn’t know any German. I felt totally abandoned.”

  The Palmhof, a concert café Otto Pollak operated with his brother Karl from 1919 to 1938

  Up to this point, nothing in her life had ever hinted that anything like this could happen. Born in Vienna on May 28, 1930, the only child of Otto and Frieda Pollak, Helga had led a sheltered childhood. Her father was the owner of a large and well-known concert café on Mariahilfer Strasse called the Palmhof. She had grown up in a spacious apartment in the same building, and had been tenderly cared for by her mother and her governess, Johanna. The adults kept her out of the café in her early years. “Going to the café was something very special for me,” she recalls.

  Otto Pollak, who came from the southern Moravian town of Kyjov/Gaya,1 had moved to Vienna and joined the army in 1916, where he saw action in a field artillery unit and was so severely wounded that one leg had to be amputated. A disabled veteran, he was awarded a silver medal for bravery, first and second class, at the end of World War I—a circumstance that would later save his life.

  In 1919 Otto and his brother Karl opened the Palmhof in Vienna and devoted great energy to running it. Otto loved the café atmosphere and personally waited on his guests, among them prominent artists such as the operetta composer Franz Léhar, the tenor Richard Tauber, and the actors Hans Moser and Fritz Imhof. Well-known musical groups often performed there, and the concerts were broadcast live weekly on RAVAG, the Austrian radio station. Once a year, Otto went in search of performers, both throughout Austria and abroad. Sometimes the musicians he discovered would make their Viennese debut at the Palmhof, then go on to play in major symphony orchestras.

  Vienna became Otto Pollak’s second home, and he felt so closely bound to it that even when dangerous times loomed, it took quite a while before he seriously considered leaving Austria—although there were ample reasons to do so. As early as 1934—in connection with an at tempted putsch by Austrian National Socialists and the assassination of Engelbert Dollfuss, the Austrian chancellor—the Palmhof became a target of vandalism by members of the then-illegal Austrian Nazi Party. Two attacks were carried out against the café, the first a smoke bomb that went off in the checkroom during a Sunday tea dance, and the second an incendiary bomb that exploded beside a cellar window in the middle of the night. “I’ll never forget the blast of that bomb,” says Helga. “I was four years old at the time. The bomb could have caused devastating damage, and it was only due to good luck and the fact that it was so poorly positioned that no one was injured and no more serious damage was done to the building. But many windows were shattered.”

  Four years later, the situation in Austria had come to a head. In the meantime, Otto Pollak and his wife, Frieda, who was fourteen years his junior, had divorced amicably. Helga remained with her father in his apartment on Mariahilfer Strasse. Her mother, who had taken an apartment of her own, visited her every day and continued to assist Otto Pollak in running the Palmhof. But it was the governess, Johanna, who looked after Helga most of the time and became a second mother to her.

  That is why Helga always associates the memory of two crucial events with the image of her governess. The first took place on the evening of March 11, 1938. “I was in the living room. Johanna had turned on the radio and was listening intently to a speech. It was the abdication speech of Kurt Schuschnigg, the Austrian chancellor. I can still remember his final words precisely—‘May God protect Austria,’ he implored. That was the first time I ever saw Johanna cry.”

  Early the next morning, Helga stood with her governess at the window overlooking Mariahilfer Strasse. “I saw soldiers marching up the street. And there were lots of swastika banners hanging from the windows of other buildings. An officer came up to my father and asked whether he would serve the soldiers. And my father said, ‘No. This is a Jewish business.’ To which the officer replied that this was of no interest to him; he cared only about his men. Suddenly the café was full of soldiers. A few days later, the Palmhof was shut down.”

  With the appearance of German troops, greeted jubilantly by a majority of the population, a new and invigorating self-confidence blossomed in the hearts of thousands of Austrians, a feeling fueled by hatred of jüdische Untermenschen (“Jewish subhumans”) and by pride in belonging to the arische Herrenrasse (“Aryan master race”) that had come to power. In an instant, the anti-Semitism that had been smoldering for decades became a raging wildfire that spread across the country with pogrom-like excesses. Jews were harassed, mistreated, and beaten. Eventually, they were fired from their jobs, robbed of their possessions, and expelled. The scale of Nazi terror on Austrian soil assumed even greater proportions than the attacks then rampant in Germany. Thousands fled across Austria’s borders or scrambled to get visas so they could emigrate.

  Until then, religion had not played a significant role in the lives of the Pollaks. They were assimilated, liberal Jews, and they rarely celebrated Jewish holidays. Helga’s first sustained encounter with Judaism was during the Jewish religious instruction class she attended in grammar school. But now, in these changing time
s, her parents gave serious thought to their Jewish roots. In April 1938 Otto, Frieda, and Helga Pollak attended synagogue for the first time and participated in a Passover seder.

  In order to assert control over the random acts of terror, the new rulers launched official actions of their own. A first transport of 151 Austrians, a group of so-called Schutzhäftlinge (“prisoners in protective custody”), among them sixty Jews, had already reached the Dachau concentration camp. In May two thousand more Jews were arrested and taken to various concentration camps. On May 20, 1938, the Nuremberg Race Laws were implemented in Austria as well. Now violence and fear began to dominate everyday life.

  However much Helga’s parents tried to shield her from the darkness of this new time, each day Helga felt it creep farther into her life. Jewish students had to sit on special “Jewish benches” in school. Children who had previously been friendly with Helga now turned their backs on her. The mob controlled the streets. “One day on the way home from school, a couple of boys I didn’t know blocked my way and shouted, ‘You Jewish pig!’ I remember that I was crying and that a policeman—it was Herr Lahner, who lived in our building—took me by the hand and comforted me and walked me home.”

  Helga’s teacher, Dora Neuss, still treated her with affection. At the end of the school year she wrote in Helga’s poetry album: “When fate turns against you, don’t fret. The moon must wane before it can wax again. Your teacher, Dora Neuss, who will miss her little laughing dove very much.”

  That year, Helga could hardly wait for summer vacation to begin. She usually spent it with her father’s family in Kyjov, near the Austrian border. There, in a stately house on Market Square, lived her grandmother Sophie, together with her father’s sister, Aunt Marta, Marta’s husband, Uncle Fritz, and their two children, Trude and Josef, whom everyone called Joši. Trude was fifteen, and Joši was twelve. Helga would play with them and the neighborhood children in the big yard behind the house, where there were chickens, a rabbit hutch, and a large shed with all sorts of tools.