The Girls of Room 28

by Hannelore Brenner

  Even with all these options, the opera Brundibár was on the short list. As Rudolf Freudenfeld recalls in his memoir, it would first be presented to the camp’s high command:

  We had to transfer the opera from our little hall in the barracks to the large hall in Sokolovna. At that point the building lay outside the ghetto barricades. The hall had a full working stage, an orchestra pit, changing rooms—everything that we needed.

  The day of our performance approached. The auditorium itself was completely empty this time around, and the choir and orchestra were ready. Then the whole SS gang entered at the balcony level. They remained standing, did not remove their caps, and the camp commandant gave his usual order: Get cracking!

  After a few scenes I turned around. They were all sitting now, not a man budged, and the caps had been set aside. When the opera was over, they made no move to leave. Even these unfeeling cynics had been touched for a moment by this sweet music. Maybe these criminals even had children at home—who knows?

  The order came that same evening: Brundibár had to be performed. But, the troupe was told, the stage was too dark, not cheerful enough for the children. By morning an entire city would have to be visible behind the wooden fence. All the necessary materials—canvas and paints and so forth—were to be distributed at once.

  We worked all night. Zelenka supervised a crew of assistants, and by morning the backdrop was finished and in place. A whole section of a town, including a school—the future!

  The high command also ordered that the visitors were to see the finale.19

  By early June 1944, Hanka Wertheimer, her mother, and her friend Miriam Rosenzweig had been in Auschwitz for three weeks. After traveling for three days, they had arrived in the middle of the night.

  Suddenly we heard shouts—there was so much shouting there! Everybody out! Everybody out! Leave your baggage! We’ll send it after you. Quick, quick, quick! We saw barbed wire, and there were big, bright spotlights shining on it—it’s a scene I will never forget. The SS men kept shouting: Out! Fast, faster! Move, move! Because there were no steps, you had to jump down from the cattle car—even my old grandmother. And the voices kept shouting: Leave your baggage behind in the car! It was horrible. It was a shock. It all happened so quickly. The spotlights, the dogs, and the SS men with their clubs. And such fear! This was a scene that, I believe, even the best movie director could never capture. Then we were in the camp. My mother said at the time, “This can’t be intended for us. We’re sure to be taken elsewhere, to a labor camp.”

  The next morning I met up with my girlfriends who were already there. Those who had arrived on the December ’43 transport, as Eva Landa and Resi Schwarz had, knew about the September transport and that about a month before we arrived they had all been sent to the gas chamber, and Fredy Hirsch along with them. I remember what terrible news it was to hear that he was dead. They didn’t know if they should tell us or not. But I found out. I saw the tall chimney. I don’t know just how far away it was, but I can still see that tall chimney, and the fire at the top. Not just smoke—fire, flames. I see it before me now. And my friends were sure that they’d be there soon themselves. And that it would be our turn, too, in six months.

  I never, ever mentioned it to my mother. I knew that she knew, and I’m certain that she knew that I knew. But talking about it was taboo. My mother’s brother and his whole family had been on the September transport. We never spoke about it. Maybe because we couldn’t have done anything about it. What good would it have done to speak about something so terrible? It was like a well-kept secret. You feel better just not saying a word. When I think back to it now—I believe that I wasn’t even afraid. I couldn’t imagine that something like that could happen to us. We always said that the war would soon be over. Six months were a long time for me. And besides, we were brought up to believe that good wins out in the end. “The truth will prevail,” that was the motto of the Czech president Masaryk, whom we revered. And it was our motto as well.

  Those six weeks in Auschwitz-Birkenau—I cannot forget them! It ran so counter to every humane instinct, that only a bizarre individual could even think up such things.

  My mother was very sad that I wasn’t getting any schooling. Sometimes we lay together on her bunk, and she would use her finger to trace a map of Europe on the underside of the bunk above us: Berlin—Hamburg—Paris—London—Madrid. We used little knots in the wood as orientation points. And I learned, without pencil or paper, and saw the map of Europe in front of me.

  Twice a day was roll call, for hours on end. They counted and counted, counted, counted. I still don’t know: Were they constantly miscounting or was there some method to it? Once there was a special roll call. That was in the women’s camp. I don’t know if it was meant as a punishment, but at any rate, we were naked and had to kneel for a long time with our hands in the air.

  I also remember how during roll call one day they called out the name of Jakob Edelstein’s son, Arye—he was our age. It was June 20th, at ten in the morning. Later we heard that they had killed him. He and his mother and grandmother were shot in front of Jakob Edelstein’s eyes.

  It was late in the morning on Friday, June 23, 1944, a pleasant summer day, when the delegation pulled up in front of the Theresienstadt commandant’s door. “We were looking out the window the whole time,” Handa recalls. “Then we saw them walking down Haupt Strasse, together with the Germans and the Jewish elders. They were talking. They never tried to approach anyone else or venture in a different direction. It was clear that we could not expect anything from them.”

  They were Dr. Maurice Rossel, the delegate from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC); Frants Hvass, director general of the Danish Foreign Ministry; and Eigil Juel Henningsen, head of the Danish Ministry of Health. Viewed from the top floor of the Girls’ Home, they were just the outlines of three figures, barely distinguishable from the Germans around them: SS Sturmbannführer Rolf Günther, Adolf Eichmann’s deputy in Section IV B 4 in the Reich Security Main Office; his brother, SS Sturmbannführer Hans Günther, head of the Central Office for Resolving the Jewish Question in Bohemia and Moravia; Hans Günther’s deputy, SS Obersturmführer Gerhard Günnel; Eichmann’s adjutant, Hauptsturmführer Ernst Möhs; Dr. Erwin Weinmann, security police chief for the Reich Protectorate; Dr. Eberhard von Thadden, section head in the Reich Foreign Ministry; and F. von Heydekampf, the representative of the German Red Cross.

  The music pavilion, with the Girls’ Home in the background

  The girls could identify only two of these men with certainty: Karl Rahm, the camp commandant (he was the only one in uniform), and the gentleman in the dark pinstripe suit and top hat. That was Dr. Paul Eppstein, the Jewish elder—their “mayor.”

  The entire entourage came from the direction of the Magdeburg Barracks, from “the Jewish Mayor’s Office,” as Dr. Rossel wrote in his minutes, “where the Jewish elder H. [sic] Eppstein briefly described for us the organization of the ghetto and suggested we begin our tour at once. His concluding words were ‘You will be visiting a normal provincial town.’ ”20

  And so they did. To the eyes of twenty-five-year-old Rossel, the ICRC’s chief representative, “it looked like a town for privileged Jews.”21 Later he would say: “At the time I was, I must say, naïve, very naïve, just a simple fellow from a village who had studied in Geneva, who knew nothing except what he had learned firsthand along the way.”

  Things had in fact been spruced up nicely: the sparkling little main square with its pavilion, where they all stopped for a few moments to cast a glance at the pretty facades, at the shops, the church, the town hall with its Bank of the Jewish Self-Administration, and the coffeehouse. Seated around tables were people specially selected for this show— men, women, and children who, if you didn’t look too closely, did not manifest the ravages of ghetto life.

  “My parents received tickets for the coffeehouse that day, and I was with them,” Vera Nath recalls. Vera’s mother was a beaut
iful woman and Vera a very pretty girl. Her father was the manager of the Kleiderkammer (“clothing warehouse”), the department that was in charge of the clothing that came principally from the baggage of the deportees.22 It was no problem for him to come up with appropriate outfits for the day.

  “The elegantly dressed women all had silk stockings, hats, scarves, and stylish handbags,” Rossel noted. “The people we met on the street were all well dressed.”

  These same people, according to Rossel’s report, also appeared to be properly nourished. And how did he determine that? “It is sufficient for this purpose,” he wrote, “to examine the photographic evidence, especially of the children’s groups. … The people who live in the large barracks prefer to eat in the communal canteens. These canteens are pleasant and quite spacious. The people who eat here are served promptly by a young girl in an apron and a starched bonnet just as in any restaurant.”

  A dining room had been created expressly for this occasion, in a wooden barracks adjacent to the Magdeburg Barracks. Thirteen-year-old Paul Rabinowitsch, one of 466 Jewish prisoners from Denmark, whom the delegation wanted to have a special look at, ate in the dining room on June 23, 1944. He remembered the day clearly:

  For me the main thing was that we Danish children were selected to eat as much as we liked that day. We were taken to a special restaurant that had just been built, with new wooden tables and chairs, and that was used only this one time. We were told we were to eat there, and we were served pea soup and potatoes with gravy. We could eat as much as we could manage. I went back for thirds, and ate my fill.

  One of the photographs that Maurice Rossel attached to his report. Decades later Paul Rabinowitsch (1930–2009), who played the trumpet in Brundibár recognized himself in it; he is the third boy from the left. June 23, 1943, was the one day that he and the Danish children were allowed to eat their fill. Rabinowitsch, who later called himself Paul Aron Sandfort, incorporated his experiences into his novel, Ben: The Alien Bird.

  “My sister worked outside the ghetto at the Kursawe villa,” Vera Nath recalls.23 “She was looking after a group of young Dutch children who had arrived on a transport from Westerbork. These children had been coached on what they were to say if the camp commandant offered them some chocolate or a tin of sardines: ‘Thank you, Uncle Rahm, but not chocolate again.’ Or, ‘Thank you, but not sardines again.’ ”

  The ruse with the sardines worked perfectly. The SS high command was, of course, well prepared for Rossel’s special interest in the delivery of international mail, which was known to function very poorly. Now the International Red Cross delegate was able to see with his own eyes and hear with his own ears that despite any shortcomings in the postal system, the many packages from Portugal—paid for by funds from the World Jewish Congress and sent through the United Relief set up by the International Red Cross—had reached their destination. “We were present in the large post office as the packages were being distributed. We saw many parcels containing sardines that had been sent from Portugal,” he wrote in his report.

  The delegation moved on from the post office to the Young People’s Home in the building’s second story, which had recently been turned into a model home with new, top-quality wooden furniture. Eva Herrmann recalls:

  Then six or seven men entered, including some SS men in uniform, but most in civilian clothes. They were touring the whole building— the post office was downstairs. They now entered our room. We had been warned beforehand not to say a word. We just stood there and thought to ourselves: Are they just plain stupid, or don’t they see that all this is new? The wood was shiny and still had the scent of new furniture; that’s how fresh it was. There were eight of us girls, fewer than before the May transports. And we had a kind of commune, by which I mean we always shared our food equally among ourselves. And they could tell that from our bread. Each person got a piece of bread every third day, and the normal practice was to ration it out and store the remainder. But we did it differently. Instead of dividing up all our bread into individual portions at the outset, we distributed only as much as each was to receive for that day. As a result, entire loaves of bread were still on our shelf. And one of the visitors noticed this and asked, “Why do all the others only have a quarter of a loaf, and these girls whole loaves?” Then a girl from Ostrava who spoke German (most of the girls didn’t understand what she was saying, since we were almost all Czechs) spontaneously remarked, “That’s because we’re a commune. We’re Communists, you see.” I can still see how our visitors cringed at that, although they stood there very stiff and erect. And I thought to myself, Oh my, now she’s said something she shouldn’t have.

  The men left very quickly and right away someone came bounding up the stairs and said, “Well, that was some disaster! Something will happen now. Don’t you realize what you said?” We were all flabbergasted. We didn’t really know what that was—Communism.

  But thank God—nothing came of it.24

  On the contrary, Rossel was quite impressed, especially by the Children’s Homes: “They are furnished quite nicely and reasonably, with very decorative murals that are also of remarkable educational value.” And perhaps it was in fact the comment made by the brave girl from Ostrava—presumably the only person among all the prisoners to speak a single word to the delegation—that prompted him to conclude his report with this bold assertion: “This Jewish town is truly astounding. In view of the fact that these people come from many different places, speak different languages, arrive from different stations in life and with different degrees of wealth, it was necessary to establish a unity, a spirit of community, among these Jews. That was very difficult. The Theresienstadt ghetto is a Communist society, led by a ‘Stalinist’ of great merit: EPPSTEIN.”

  What else could one expect of a Maurice Rossel? Of a young man who took his job so literally that, unless it was demanded of him, he never looked to his right or his left and certainly never peeked behind the scenery? “During this visit I was supposed to view what they showed me,” he declared in a conversation with Claude Lanzmann. And that is exactly what he did. No more and no less. And to make sure that Rossel would also be able to tell the world about the astonishing cultural life in Theresienstadt, he was driven through town alongside the “mayor” in a limousine chauffeured by Hans Wostrell from Linz, a brutal SS officer who, in order to look more like Paul Eppstein’s driver, dressed in civilian clothes.

  As the bells in the church steeple began to toll at the stroke of five o’clock, the town orchestra, under the direction of Carlo S. Taube, began to play a medley of cheerful tunes. One of them was a song, so Otto Pollak tells us, from the operetta The Czar’s Diamond by Granichstaedten: “For you, my dear, I’ve made myself beautiful.” But who among the visitors could have or would have wanted to take that obvious musical hint?

  Everything was in place at the Sokolovna when the visitors finally arrived. Upstairs there was a rehearsal for Verdi’s Requiem. In the main auditorium the children were performing Brundibár, from which, according to the plan, the visitors were to see the finale. “We stood on the stage and they told us that when given our cue we should start with the finale,” Eva Herrmann, who was in the chorus of schoolchildren, recalls. “We waited a long time, and then someone came running in and said, ‘Now.’ And we started. And then someone else came running in and said, ‘No, not yet.’ And so it went, back and forth. We knew, of course, that we were putting on a comedy act for somebody. But of course, since this was a commission of the International Red Cross, we also thought and hoped that this would help us in some way. They might say, ‘These children sing so beautifully we just have to help them.’ We always hoped. Or at least most of us hoped—that maybe something would come of it after all.”

  “I was given the first signal as the car turned the corner,” Rudolf Freudenfeld noted in his report. “The second signal meant that they were coming up the stairs, and at the third signal I dropped my raised hand and gave the downbeat. The music that greeted
the visitors was: ‘We have defeated Brundibár because we weren’t afraid. We didn’t let ourselves be defeated.’ The children had been told that at one specific point they were to hold up high whatever they had in their hand—books, schoolbags, notebooks. But, like children everywhere, most of them had forgotten their prop. And so they simply raised their balled fists. As I was told later, the visitors liked it.”

  “We would like to say,” Rossel added at the end of his report, “that we were greatly astonished to find the ghetto to be a town that lives an almost normal life; we had expected worse. We told the officers of the SS who escorted us that the difficulty we had encountered in obtaining permission to visit Theresienstadt was the most surprising thing of all.”

  “There was that whole farce with the Red Cross,” Judith Schwarzbart comments, decades later, when recalling that remarkable day, “and my father was ordered to beautify the park, to set out flowers. Once the Red Cross hubbub was over, I was astonished to see that nothing whatsoever came of it. Why didn’t these men see anything? Why didn’t they look behind the facade? If they had just taken a peek, they would have seen all the old half-starved people who weren’t allowed out on the street. If they had just opened a door to one of the barracks, they would have seen what was going on there. But they didn’t do any of it. They walked down the street, through the lovely park. The coffeehouse had been made to look nice and pretty, with a few tables set outside, where young attractive women in elegant clothes were ordered to sit and drink a cup of coffee; and in the park was a pavilion, where they played music, and the Red Cross people never went over to have a peek at what was behind this farce. And that astounded me. It shocked me. Yes, it robbed me of a bit of my faith.”