The Girls of Room 28

by Hannelore Brenner

  By March the blue skies of February had long since yielded to Theresienstadt’s typical gray weather and low-hanging clouds. Showers alternated with snow flurries, and no change seemed to be in sight. But life went steadily on. “It seems almost incredible to me,” Helga wrote on March 18, 1944, “that in only one month and twenty-eight days I will be fourteen. I was talking with Papa yesterday and I asked him what he would have given me on my birthday in peacetime. He said that if he had the money, he would give me a globe, a microscope, and lots of books. It made me so happy that he had guessed what I wanted.”

  On April 3 she wrote: “The finest time in Theresienstadt is when I can debate with Papa. I learn so much. Yesterday Papa read me a few paragraphs from Schopenhauer; he’s in favor of everyone keeping a diary. It makes me so happy that I can write to a good friend who will never desert me if I don’t want it. At first almost all the girls kept a diary. Now it’s only two or three.”

  By mid-April, Helga found that she had lost her appetite and her stomach was aching—symptoms of jaundice. She was put back into sick bay. Her spirits plummeted. “Any idiot can see that this weather just won’t end,” she said during a visit to her father, who recorded her words in his own diary. “The sun is moving away from the earth.”

  Life in the ghetto seemed to be improving. “Assembly this evening at eight o’clock about the new mail regulations. Permission to write every six weeks. All packages allowed except for tea, coffee, tobacco, cigarettes, and money, which are forbidden. In the future packages will be passed on in the presence of the receiver,” Otto Pollak noted on February 6. And one month later: “Cancellation of the rule that we must greet anyone in uniform.”

  March 6 to March 12 was spring-cleaning week. “Our Invalids’ Home won a prize,” Otto wrote. “My share was two pounds of bread, half a tin of liverwurst, three ounces of margarine, and three ounces of sugar.” At six o’clock on the evening of March 11 he visited the coffeehouse: “Orchestra concert, sixteen musicians, with Professor Carlo S. Taube. They played selections from Mozart’s Magic Flute, Fantasia from Schubert’s sketchbook, Kreisler’s Praeludium and Allegro, a solo by Fröhlich, Dvořák’s Fourth, two Slavic dances.”

  Change was in the air in Theresienstadt: “There is to be a new central medical library with a large reading room,” Dr. Munk, the head of the health department, wrote on March 13, 1944, in a letter he sent to Jakob Edelstein on the assumption that Edelstein was in good health in Auschwitz-Birkenau. “The building that adjoins the Infants’ Home is being added onto it; on the block set aside for small children a toddlers’ nursery is being built in the movie hall, and the wooden barracks have become the living quarters for working women. The park on Market Square is making great progress, and within a few weeks there will be a fountain in the middle of a large flower bed. According to the plans, a music pavilion to be located opposite the coffeehouse seems to be very promising.”2

  The coffeehouse was one of the first additions meant to turn Theresienstadt into the Potemkin village that the Nazis were about to build. Opened in December 1942, it marked the beginning of musical activities that were officially permitted and encouraged by the SS. At first it was Carlo S. Taube and the Ledeč Orchestra who usually played there along with the Weiss Jazz Quintet, which was directed by Fritz Weiss and featured musicians Pavel Libensky, Wolfi Lederer, Coco Schumann, and Franta Goldschmidt. As time went on, and as more musical instruments arrived in the ghetto and concerts were now performed on the explicit orders of the SS, additional ensembles were formed. In the winter of 1942–43, Karel Fröhlich, Heini Taussig, Romouald Süssmann, and Freddy Mark formed a string quartet, which initially performed with the world-famous Viennese cellist Luzian Horwitz.

  Once the second floor of the coffeehouse was opened for concerts, a group calling itself the Ghetto Swingers had great success with their first revue, titled “Children Not Admitted.” This orchestra, whose membership constantly grew and changed, played in the style of an American swing band—even though jazz was forbidden within the Third Reich—and was instantly the most popular ensemble in Theresienstadt.

  Entrance tickets to the coffeehouse

  Upon closer inspection, the coffeehouse did not offer what its name promised; it was anything but a warm, pleasant spot to enjoy swing music and a selection of delicious cakes and good coffee. First, you had to have an entrance pass, which you might be issued once or at most twice a year, and which designated the date and duration of your visit. “Authorization for a visit to the coffeehouse from noon to 2:00 P.M., ground floor,” it might read. You could spend a maximum of two hours there over a cup of ersatz coffee. “But,” as Thomas Mandl, who at age sixteen was a talented enough violinist to be a member of the coffee-house orchestra, said, “the good thing was that this cup of ersatz coffee was sweetened with a teaspoon of real sugar. And as a musician in the coffeehouse I was permitted one cup of coffee per shift. Usually I saved up my coffee rations from three shifts and then on my fourth shift had them give me a cup with four teaspoons of sugar. And that, of course, was an incredible way to fight off hunger.”

  Visitors, however, had to make do with just one cup of ersatz coffee and one teaspoon of sugar—definitely not enough to combat the agony of hunger. At best they managed to forget it for a while, thanks to lovely music by Lehár, Waldteufel, Béla Kéler, Johann Strauss, or, when Busoni’s brilliant pupil Carlo S. Taube was directing, challenging arrangements by Ravel and Saint-Saëns.

  The coffeehouse was reserved for adults and was essentially off-limits to the girls of Room 28. But the music often found its way up to them, for it came from Q 418 on “Neue Gasse,” as it was now called, a building that stood kitty-corner to the Girls’ Home. From their windows the girls could watch people coming and going, although they could not observe what was happening inside.

  But other unusual changes in the ghetto were not hidden from view. “The barricades are being taken down on Arische Strasse, the barbed wire fence is being removed from the main square,” Otto Pollak noted on April 1. And two days later: “Daylight saving time begins tomorrow. Evening curfew has been extended until nine o’clock.”

  Sometime during the night of April 11, one of the writers for Vedem sneaked into the “brain of the Theresienstadt rumor mill.” Using the pseudonym Syndikus, he reported his discoveries as follows: “The first thing I learned was that our Father [Karl Rahm] intends to issue an order, the gist of which is that all work squads will be forced to send their youngest personnel to do so-called maintenance work. To assure the rapid reconstruction of our town, it was our Father’s wish that specialists of all kinds should participate to the fullest extent. For this purpose Father Bedřich had the gymnasium, which had been turned into a hospital, cleared to have it converted into a synagogue, theater, and future cinema. According to the latest news, which I obtained just a few hours before writing this, an open-air café is to be established on the roof of the gymnasium. He had the barbed wire fence on the square removed and the square transformed into a park, where he had a music pavilion erected to give the inhabitants of Terezín an opportunity for entertainment and refreshment during their lunch hour and in the evening after work.”3

  Sure enough, between noon and one o’clock on April 13, a bright and sunny day, the town orchestra began to play for the first time under the alternating direction of Carlo S. Taube, Peter Deutsch, and Karel Ančerl. It was scheduled to play on Market Square daily, if the weather was good, between eight and nine in the evening, an innovation that gave Syndikus cause for further speculation: “It is said that a restaurant is also going to be built beside the garden on the town square. The bill of fare has not yet been decided. Our town council has also ordered a fleet of hackney cabs for our international spa. The working people of Theresienstadt will also be provided for. There is to be a trolley line laid to make it easier for them to get to and from work.”

  Theresienstadt was well on its way to being turned into a sham show-piece, very much in the style of the
village of facades that Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin had quickly assembled to deceive Catherine the Great on her 1787 trip to inspect the south of Russia and observe the prosperity of the Crimea. Great swindles need just a little paint and a few false labels. The banal premise of this Nazi propaganda campaign in Theresienstadt—it’s not the contents but the packaging that count—had as its sole purpose deceiving the world as to the true goals of the Nazi regime.

  And so as of April 15, the daily decrees were now published, nicely illustrated, as Communications from the Jewish Self-Administration. The camp high command was renamed the SS Service Office, and the commandant became the head of the SS Service Office. The Jewish elder was transformed into the mayor, and the ghetto court was now the community court. The guards posted outside the barracks were no longer ghetto guards but community guards. And there were no longer any deportation trains leaving Theresienstadt, but workers’ deployment transports. After all, Theresienstadt was not a concentration camp or a transit camp or a ghetto, but a Jewish settlement area—the “town that the Führer gave the Jews.”

  There was even a contest—“Who Can Come Up with the Best Name?”—that was announced in the Communications from the Jewish Self-Administration for April 23. “The following streets and squares are to be renamed: Rampart III, the lane around the former sheep barn behind Haupt Strasse 2, the lane behind the building at Wall Strasse 8 … There are eight prizes in all: first prize, two tins of sardines in oil and a loaf of bread.”

  The opening of the community center at the Sokolovna, on 3 West Gasse, was celebrated on April 30, 1944, in the presence of the Council of Elders, the heads of all camp departments, and work brigades appointed by the town’s administration. As the chronicler of the town’s musical events, Viktor Ullmann, wrote, “To the delight of music lovers there was an ensemble composed of Messrs. Taussig, Kling, Süssmann, Mark, and Paul Kohn, joined by Karel Ančerl for the performance of a Brahms sextet, which deserves special praise for its precision, clarity, beauty of tone, and unity of style.”4

  “Beautification” was the new slogan that turned all of Theresienstadt upside down and marked the implementation of a critical new phase that began with the introduction of camp commandant Karl Rahm, who arrived on February 8, 1944, as the replacement for Anton Burger. Born in Austria and trained as an auto mechanic, Rahm had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1934, had worked closely with Eichmann in the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna and Prague, and was very well prepared for his assignment, which Adolf Eichmann summed up succinctly at his trial in Israel as one of turning the ghetto of Theresienstadt into “a billboard for the outside world. He [Himmler] evidently wanted to have some evidence on hand, so that when special delegations from abroad addressed him on the issue of the murder of Jews and so forth, he could say, ‘That’s not true; go have a look at Theresienstadt.’ ”5

  While the ghetto was undergoing these strange changes, the prisoners in it were increasingly gripped by mistrust, fear, and sadness. Where had their friends gone? Where were they now? How were they doing—Pavla, Zdenka, Olile, Poppinka, Holubička, Milka, Helena, Irena, Eva Weiss, and Eva Landa? Those were the questions the girls in Room 28 kept asking over and over. No postcards had arrived, no signs of life that might have eased their fears. “Eva, why did you leave?” Lenka Lindt wrote on a slip of paper on March 26, 1944. She missed her friend Eva Landa very much.

  Watched over by their guards, the prisoners prepare for the visit of the Red Cross Delegation. Drawing by Alfred Kantor

  Eva, Eva, why did you leave?

  Why have you left an open wound behind?

  Why did you leave

  For a land so far away?

  Lenka, are you angry with me?

  What could I have done?

  I had to go away

  I could not defeat the Germans.

  I’m not angry with you, Eva. I do understand.

  I know that if you could

  You would fulfill my wishes.

  You know, don’t you, Evička

  That all will be well after the war

  And we will never leave one another.

  After the war we shall meet again

  And renew our friendship.

  Eva Landa had been deported to Auschwitz along with her mother, father, and friend Harry Kraus on December 15, 1943. “The ‘trip’ was horrible,” she would report decades later.

  We rode in a cattle car for about three days. In each sealed car were fifty people and their baggage. There was one small barred window. We couldn’t lie down; there wasn’t enough room. Some people died on the way. At one point I began to wail terribly. It was a genuine case of hysterics. They asked me what was the matter. And I said that we’d been traveling for so long and so far and that we would never come back. I had a premonition.

  On the third day we arrived in Auschwitz. Suddenly the door opened, and we saw a wide area garishly lit with spotlights and surrounded by barbed wire. There were strange creatures running up and down along the platform. They were wearing pajamas and little caps on their shaved heads; they shouted something and took our baggage away. They looked as though they were crazy. Then we were divided up: men on one side, women and children on the other. We were led to a building called the “sauna.” That was a new word for me back then and I didn’t understand what it meant. There they took all our remaining things away, our clothes and shoes. Then we had to stand under a shower that ran cold and then very hot, for about fifteen minutes. SS men walked back and forth the whole time—even though we were all completely naked! When it was over we were given old tattered clothes and wooden slippers. Only the soles were wooden, the rest was just old rags. Each of us got two slippers that didn’t even match. Then we had to line up for “tattooing.” We were ordered to hold out our left arm to be tattooed. My number was 71266, my mother’s was 71267.

  That was how we spent the first night. The next morning we were led to the camp. There we met people from the transport that had left Theresienstadt in September. They told us how lucky we were that everyone had been taken to the sauna, that no selection had been made, and that no one had been sent directly to the gas chamber. We—the entire December transport—were assigned to the so-called Family Camp B II b, where men, women, and children could remain together, although in separate barracks. In the opinion of the experienced prisoners, we were lucky in that as well, since in all the other camps, except the one for Gypsies, the separation of the men from the women, of the elderly and children from those capable of work, took place immediately on the ramp.

  The Family Camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau had been set up by the prisoners of the September transport. As a few historians have noted (something that Eva Landa could not have known at the time), Himmler’s goal here was the same as with his model ghetto of Theresienstadt. It was intended as a tool of cunning Nazi propaganda in case it should become necessary to deceive foreign visitors about what was really going on in Auschwitz. That was why families in Camp B II b remained together. And that was why Fredy Hirsch was allowed by the SS to organize the children’s block.

  The September transport had been stamped with the secret directive “SB six months,” which meant “Sonderbehandlung [special treatment] after six months of quarantine.” SB was the Nazi euphemism for “death by gas.”

  “It was December 1943 and my life in Auschwitz-Birkenau began,” Eva Landa continues.

  December twenty-fifth was my thirteenth birthday. I was sick and terribly unhappy because I had been separated from my friends in Theresienstadt. I remembered my days in the ghetto as a happy time in my life. I couldn’t shake the feeling that we would never go home again.

  It turned very cold, and we were poorly dressed. We were hungry. In the morning we were given a dark green liquid that was called “coffee,” in the evening turnip soup and a piece of bad bread. The provisions we had brought with us were left on the train. We had to stand for hours of roll call. They would count us over and over again. It was
torture.

  The quarantine period passed, and we had to start working. My father had to pave a road, and my mother wove cloth for the German military industry. I was taken to the children’s block run by Fredy Hirsch, where a life similar to the one we had in Theresienstadt was organized for us. We played sports, theater, and wrote poems. And we sang: “Alouette,” “The Ode to Joy,” Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” and many more. I remember that one day we were singing a song in Latin and an SS man asked Fredy Hirsch what it was we were singing. And he replied, “God, give us bread and peace.” To which the SS man said, “You’ve already got it.” And Fredy replied, “That’s why they’re singing about it.”

  The food in our block was better than in the others. Fredy Hirsch had seen to it that we got the same so-called children’s soup that they had in the Gypsy camp. It was the same as the adult soup but with barley groats added, plus white bread. We thanked him with a little poem before meals: “In our taba’at group [Hebrew for ‘ring’] we all are very hungry. / There’s nothing to laugh about, because we have to wash our dishes, otherwise Fredy will shout at us. / And now we can sit down and—eat!”

  A vague hope sprang up—maybe we would somehow succeed in leaving Auschwitz alive, although we knew what was going on around us. We even wrote skits about it. I remember there was a twelve-year-old named Štepan, a cousin of Handa Pollak’s. We had been in the same class in Prague. He was small and very talented. He and his friends in the Auschwitz-Birkenau children’s block enacted this scene for us: After the war Štepan is walking along in Prague, and someone asks him what time it is. He looks at his arm and answers with the number tattooed there. And the passersby say, “This fellow is crazy!” and grab him and take him to the madhouse. And he replies, “I knew I’d end up in Heydebreck.” Heydebreck—that was a special term for us children. We didn’t know any town by that name. We thought it was a Nazi invention. For us going to Heydebreck meant being sent to the gas chambers.6