The Girls of Room 28

by Hannelore Brenner

  One week after his visit to the ghetto, Rossel sent his companion, Dr. Eberhard von Thadden, legation councilor in the Reich Foreign Ministry, copies of two photographs taken during the Theresienstadt visit, accompanied by these words: “We would like to take this opportunity to express to you, in the name of the International Committee of the Red Cross, our sincere gratitude for organizing our visit to Theresienstadt. Thanks to your efforts our visit was facilitated in all respects. We shall always have fine memories of our trip to Prague, and we are happy to assure you yet again that our report of our visit to Theresienstadt will come as a relief to a great many people, inasmuch as we found conditions there satisfactory.”

  The real satisfaction, however, was felt by those who had initiated and directed this successful production, primarily because of this key assertion in Rossel’s report, which could now be disseminated around the world. At a time when thirty-two thousand people had already died in Theresienstadt and approximately sixty-eight thousand people had been transported to the East, Maurice Rossel wrote: “The camp at Theresienstadt is a ‘final destination camp,’ and normally no one who has come to this ghetto is sent on to somewhere else.”

  A visit to a “Jewish labor camp,” which had already been authorized by Himmler, had now become superfluous. The inspectors had no further questions, so no other Potemkin villages needed to be put on display. The family camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau could be eliminated.

  On July 2, 1944, all the women that Mengele had selected as being capable of work were sent on foot to the women’s camp, which was not too far from the family camp. Eva Landa recalls:

  For several days we could still look through the barbed wire and see the people who were left behind in the family camp. Then it became very quiet and empty there. There was heavy smoke coming from the crematoria chimneys. New selections were being made on a constant basis. The weak and sickly and those who had succeeded in bringing their children to the women’s camp had to go back to the family camp. Then came the last selection in Auschwitz that I was part of. One row ahead of me were Helena Mendl and her mother, who told the SS man that Helena was not completely healthy, that she had had meningitis as a child. And I think Holubička’s mother said something similar. They hoped that this would keep their daughters from being assigned heavy work. They were separated out and had to stand off by themselves. And then there was also our block elder, Marika, a beautiful young woman. She had a three-year-old child. And the SS man told her, “Leave the child here. Do you know where they will take you if you stay with her?” And Marika said, “Yes, and I’m staying with my child.” So they stood off from us at a little distance, in an extra group—Helena, Holubička, and Marika with her little daughter. It was the last time I saw them.

  My mother and I were almost the last to be chosen for work and put on a new transport. We were on the train again, though we didn’t know where we were headed. But we did know that we were leaving Auschwitz, leaving the horror of the gas chambers. We knew what those words meant. And we thought that it was a good thing to get away from Auschwitz—far away—because it was very easy to perish there, and very hard to escape death.

  We rode on the train for a long time. Then we had to change to a small train with open cars. We all had to stand; there wasn’t enough room to sit. The region we were riding through was very beautiful— forest all around us. It was summer, the sun was shining—and we were far away from Auschwitz-Birkenau.

  “After this final selection in early July 1944, nothing happened for ten days,” Eva Weiss recalls.

  Life in Block 31 went on. Then there was another lockdown— disruption and goodbyes. I saw many of the children for the last time. I remember how terribly sorry I felt for Zajíček. It was impossible for her to make it through the selection—she was so small. She had always clung to me. She was such a poor, lovable thing, such a forlorn child. She radiated warmth. There was a special aura about her, as if she were trying to say, Come, help me! She knew what awaited her. All the children knew. We knew that we would never see each other again.

  Our group was taken to the Auschwitz women’s camp. We huddled very close together. The chimney was still a real possibility for us. We thought it was some evil joke by Mengele to let us think that we would escape the gas. We spent several days under dreadful conditions in the women’s camp before we were led to the “sauna” again. We thought—this is it. But instead of gas, water came out of the showerheads. What an immense relief! Then they threw a pile of dirty clothes and shoes at us, and we had to quickly grab something that looked more or less like it might fit, with them bellowing at us the whole time. After we were dressed we looked around—and broke into loud, uncontrollable laughter. We simply couldn’t believe that we had escaped the worst. We still had our hair, which was a major exception in the camp. There we stood, howling with laughter and waiting for what would happen next.

  On July 2, 1944, they gave us different clothes, a kind of khaki uniform, and we were put on cattle cars. We couldn’t believe our good luck. We were all young women. We were in a hopeful mood, and through the chinks in the car we could make out a green landscape. We appeared to be getting closer to Germany and we thought nothing from here on could be as bad as the time we had spent in the shadow of the chimneys. After a day traveling on the train, guarded the whole time by female SS personnel, a few of the cars were uncoupled. Then the train moved on.

  In early July 1944, Hanka Wertheimer and her mother survived a selection. It was their last one before they would leave Auschwitz, and before the family camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau B II b was eliminated during the night of July 10, 1944. Hanka remembers:

  We had to walk past the SS men and give our age and profession. Eva Landa and another girl from our home, Gerty Kersten, were in front of me. I can still hear an SS man saying as he pointed at Eva and Gerty: “Look at those pretty Jewesses.” They were sent to the right. I was directly behind them and I said, “Agriculture, sixteen years old.” I was lying because my mother had told me to. She had also managed—I don’t know how—to get hold of a dab of lipstick and had rubbed it on my cheeks so that I’d look healthier, because I was very pale. Like Eva and Gerty I was sent to the right. As were my friends Miriam Rosenzweig and her sister Vera. We didn’t yet know what it meant to stand on the left or the right. Next to the SS men were two kapos—Jews who had to help see that the orders of the SS were carried out. One of them was a Dr. Wehle, a lawyer my mother knew. When he noticed her and saw that although she gave her age as forty—in reality she was forty-three—she was sent to the left, he gave her concealed signals to slip into the line on the right, which she immediately did. I didn’t notice any of this because I was already past the SS men and was standing with my back to them. That’s how it came about that my mother stayed with me and we finally made it out of Auschwitz together.

  After this selection we arrived in the women’s camp. It was on the other side of the railroad tracks. We met a lot of women from Poland who you could tell had been there for a long time. … But we were soon loaded onto freight cars and sent elsewhere.

  Theresienstadt, August 19, 1944: “A cultural documentary is being filmed this afternoon,” Otto Pollak noted in his diary, “in a hollow on the road to Litoměřice—an open-air cabaret that accommodates an audience of about 2,000. About sixty swimmers of both sexes are to be filmed at the SS swimming pool outside the ghetto. Dita Sachs from the Nurses’ Home, slender, about five foot nine, blond, blue-eyed, was excluded, along with two other blond girls. I’ve also heard they’ve excluded a Danish actor, a blond giant of aman. Gerron, who enjoys making inappropriate jokes about Jews, is directing.”

  “Crazy things have been happening during the last few days—they’re making a film!” Eva Herrmann noted with astonishment in her diary the next day.25 “The town orchestra, the children’s pavilion, our performances, and life on the streets and even outside of Theresienstadt. Five girls from each room are to report for the filming. I managed to be one of them, and
so we were able to get out of the ghetto, to Travice, where a stage was set up.”

  The scenery was in place, the dress rehearsal had worked perfectly, a director was found, a script authorized, and a film crew hired. The filming could begin. It was an enterprise that had long been planned by the top echelon of the SS in Prague. Theresienstadt: A Documentary of a Jewish Settlement was a piece of Nazi propaganda that has since come to be known as The Führer Gives the Jews a Town.

  Kurt Gerron—an actor, cabaret performer, and former star of Germany’s preeminent film studio UFA—was both the producer and the director. His 1928 recording of “Mack the Knife” from The Threepenny Opera had made him a sensation, and when he appeared as the vaudeville director Kiepert in The Blue Angel alongside Marlene Dietrich, his international career was launched—and then derailed by Hitler. In January 1944 he was deported from the Westerbork Camp in the Netherlands and sent to Theresienstadt, where he soon established a cabaret called the Carousel. One of Gerron’s leading lyricists, Martin Greiffenhagen, was assigned to be his scriptwriter for the film, and from Prague came the team from Aktualita, the weekly Czech newsreel. The main actors and walk-ons were already on location—the inmates of the Theresienstadt ghetto.

  “In those days I was working in the fields,” Vera Nath recalls. “And we saw people going for a swim in the Eger. It looked like a summer camp, like a shore resort.”

  “My sister Zdenka and I and some other girls,” Marta Fröhlich recalls, “were brought to a swimming area along the banks of the Eger. We had to put on bathing suits, then sing a song, jump gleefully into the water, and then keep on ducking underwater and pretending that we were so very happy. There were swings that we had to swing on. Then they gave us some bread spread with margarine—not to eat, but to hold so that they could film us. And my brothers had to climb up on a horse-drawn wagon. And the wagon was full of fruits and vegetables—apples, pears, potatoes, carrots. But during the entire ride they weren’t allowed to bite into a single apple.”

  “I remember one thing,” Handa Pollak says. “The bigger girls from our Home were working in the vegetable gardens. Of course, eating any of the vegetables was strictly forbidden. While they were making the film the girls were painted brown so they would look tanned and healthy. Every girl got a basket of vegetables to dangle from her arm, and then they had to walk along the road toward the camera in a group, singing. At one particular point they had to pick up an apple or some other fruit and bite into it, then turn a corner, where the basket and even the fruit they had bitten into were immediately taken away. I still recall them telling us about it. It made them laugh so hard, and we laughed along with them. We just made fun of the whole charade.”

  “When someone gave a whistle, we had to march off with rakes in our hands and walk past the church,” Helga Pollak recalls. “And there on the steps stood Kurt Gerron. Then there was another whistle, and we had to take a few steps back, stand stock-still, and then came the command again: Keep marching and be cheerful.”

  “We were afraid of Kurt Gerron,” Ela Stein comments in describing the general atmosphere. “The Germans were constantly circling around him. We didn’t know whether he was in cahoots with them or not. There was a lot of tension in the air. The Czech film people weren’t even allowed to speak with us.”

  The team filmed every inch of the Potemkin village: the Bank of the Jewish Self-Administration; the post office, where the walk-ons had to stand in line waiting for packages to be distributed; a meeting of the Council of Elders, which was moved from the gloomy Magdeburg Barracks to an elegantly furnished room in the Sokolovna; firemen extinguishing a fake fire; doctors performing surgery. And, of course, the central library, managed by Professor Utitz, had been “spruced up beyond recognition,” displaying the splendid spines of the Encyclopaedia Judaica and the Jewish Lexicon.26

  On the Sokolovna terrace, where Helga had lowered her notes down to her father while she was ill with encephalitis, the camera captured people dancing past, dressed in their finest evening clothes; people sitting convivially next to each other under parasols, sipping from champagne glasses with straws. In the garden, prominent people were strolling and engaging in lively conversations; frolicking children played in the children’s playground; and laborers in the workshops—carpenters, cobblers, launderers, tailors—went merrily about their work. On the outskirts of the ghetto a cabaret program was performed before an audience of about two thousand.27

  “In a village near Travice, where they had set up a stage, I watched them film a scene that didn’t come out right,” Eva Herrmann recalls, “and saw Rahm, the camp commandant—I think it was Rahm—slap Zelenka, the architect and famed set designer from the Prague National Theater. And that started me thinking: Oh my, something’s not right here. The whole thing is really just one huge sham. They also had young people get up on the stage, and then they pointed to this one or that one. Suddenly it became clear to me that they were looking for particular types, Jewish types, and SS Scharführer Haindl pointed at me—I had black curly hair. And at that moment I knew I didn’t want to have any part in this hoax, made myself scarce, and mingled in with the crowd.”28

  Despite both a heat wave—the temperature soared to 104 degrees Fahrenheit on August 21—and a plague of bedbugs, the filming proceeded according to plan. As in the previous year, many of the living quarters, including the Girls’ Home, had to be freed from bedbugs and lice. “Helga is sleeping in Frau Mandl’s room at the Home for Invalids, above Frau Heilbrun’s bed,” Otto Pollak noted on August 24. “At nine in the evening Helga takes a cold bath in the bathtub. Altenstein looks for bedbugs with a cigarette lighter. I watch his silhouette from the courtyard. Helga has slept well during the first night here with us. Her sleep wasn’t disrupted by bedbugs. She has words of praise for our washing facility, which reminds her of peacetime.”

  On August 28, Otto Pollak likewise had to flee the bedbugs. The night before, he had turned on the light every half hour so that he and Schmitz, from the adjoining bed, could hunt down and kill hundreds of bedbugs. Now he was sleeping in the open air for the first time. “A dark blue sky sown with stars, cool air. After weeks of not being able to sleep, I slept like the Lord God himself, until five-thirty. I served Helga her breakfast—coffee and bread with margarine—in bed. She was absolutely delighted and said that this was the first time she’d ever been served breakfast in bed in Theresienstadt.”

  Meanwhile, the shooting went on. They filmed the town orchestra playing in Market Square; a soccer game before about four hundred spectators in the courtyard of the Dresden Barracks at three o’clock on the afternoon of August 31; the first act of The Tales of Hoffmann in the auditorium of the Sokolovna; and the premiere of Pavel Haas’s Study for String Orchestra, played by the symphony orchestra under the direction of Karel Ančerl. And against the backdrop of a town created by František Zelenka, they filmed the children’s opera Brundibár.

  “I recall those days only vaguely,” Flaška says. “We were very agitated. It was hard work to put it on for the Germans, even though we knew the opera very well. But there was Kurt Gerron, who was very energetic, and there were all the camera people, and sitting up in the balcony was the SS. I remember the SS sitting up there, watching us. It was different from usual—a tense atmosphere.”

  “We weren’t used to the large stage of the Sokolovna,” Handa explains. “There was a lot more room than in the Magdeburg Barracks. I didn’t feel at all comfortable on this stage. It was all too new, too big. From time to time we had to move to the music and arrive at a particular spot on the stage. And I was afraid sometimes that I wouldn’t end up where I was supposed to end up, and would be standing in the wrong spot.”

  And yet the children performed their opera with growing enthusiasm. As always, many of their fans were in the audience. They all wanted to see Brundibár and were eager to see how it was going to turn out this time, under spotlights and cameras. In spite of everything, it was an extraordinary event, both for
those in the cast and for the audience. Let the Germans do what they wanted with their hoax and their film, let them present the world with their fairy-tale lie about Theresienstadt as a cultural paradise and model ghetto—they could not lay a finger on Brundibár.

  Up in the balcony, on the side reserved for the Germans, unexpected guests were seated: the wives and children of the SS men.

  Now they could show them. The children could show them what people degraded as subhumans and often cursed as “Jewish swine” were capable of. We, their message seemed to be, we poor, starving, caged children can put on a show like this. With music that pleases even you, and your children!

  This notice required Flaška to participate in the production of Brundibár, which the director Kurt Gerron was filming for the Nazi propaganda documentary.

  “The music is simply enchanting,” Thomas Mandl, the young violinist for the coffeehouse orchestra, wrote, describing his impressions after a few performances. “The music is of such high quality, so wonderfully varied and demanding and thrilling and evocative, that anyone with a spark of musicality is carried away from start to finish. There are so many subtle and clever melodic devices and the instrumentation is so intelligent and at the same time so deftly written that these children could really sing their roles. They certainly weren’t professionals. They were just ‘ordinary’ children. But with that ordinary set in quotes.”