The Girls of Room 28

by Hannelore Brenner

  On August 20, the children put on their beloved opera for one of the last of a total of fifty-five performances. And little Paul made his trumpet ring for all it was worth. “When the SS was present, I always had this shadowy feeling at the back of my head. I knew I could not play wrong, and you can hear every wrong note very clearly on a trumpet. Rahm would notice, I thought to myself, and be mad at me, and put me on a transport. And in those moments it was as if I were playing for my life.”

  Miriam Rosenzweig

  Miriam Rosenzweig was born in Košice, a town in eastern Slovakia, near the Hungarian border, on November 7, 1929. When she was six, her family’s serious financial problems drove them to move to Ostrava in the hope of making a fresh start. But the Nazis soon put an abrupt end to their efforts. On October 18, 1939, Miriam’s father and 901 other Jews from Ostrava were forced to board a transport for, as it was called in the official jargon, “voluntary resettlement to a reeducation camp.” It was the first transport to leave the German Reich and its annexed territories. Its destination was the little Polish town of Nisko on the San River, in the district of Lublin. Miriam never saw her father again. Three years later, in early October 1942, Miriam, her mother, and her sister arrived in Theresienstadt. “I was ill all that winter. I had dysentery and an ear infection. There were no medicines. The doctor could only puncture my eardrum every day to drain the pus. It got worse and worse, and I had a high fever.”

  Finally, vital medicines found their way into the ghetto, and Miriam recovered. It was spring, however, before she could join her mother in the attic of the Magdeburg Barracks, where she lived until the end of 1943, when she moved into Room 28.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Ghetto Tears

  The evening of September 2, 1944, did not bode well. Around eleven o’clock that night, a severe thunderstorm broke out above Theresienstadt, drenching the town in heavy rains. The bad weather caused a power outage and left the ghetto in terrifying darkness, relieved only by repeated flashes of lightning. “After that, swarms of starving bedbugs flooded the entire camp,” Otto Pollak wrote.

  By this time people were caught up in a mixture of euphoria and fear. The tension that had prevailed during the visit of the International Red Cross delegation and the unrelenting frenzy surrounding the propaganda film still seemed to hang in the air and charge it with explosive force. Artistic pursuits also took on a feverish, almost superhuman intensity.

  In the Sokolovna auditorium, in the town hall, in the Magdeburg Barracks and the old movie hall, in the gymnasium of L 417, in the coffee-house, and in many attics—there were performances everywhere, some of them of the highest artistic quality. Edith Steiner-Kraus provided the accompaniment on a spinet for a performance of Carmen directed by Franz Eugen Klein; Karl Fischer conducted Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah. In the attic of the Magdeburg Barracks, Norbert Frýd presented a dramatic version of the biblical story of Esther with music by Karel Reiner, and Hanus Jochowitz directed Mozart’s Bastien and Bastienne on a different stage. There were evening song recitals with Karel Berman and Rafael Schächter, chamber music concerts, and solo concerts by several piano virtuosi—Bernhard Kaff, Gideon Klein, Edith Steiner-Kraus, Renée Gärtner-Geiringer, and Juliette Arányi.

  This poem, “The Vintage Wine of 1944,” written by an unnamed fellow prisoner of Theresienstadt, was saved by Otto Pollak.

  THE VINTAGE WINE OF 1944

  When there will come the time you seek a name

  For a drop of vintage wine,

  A name to capture what’s within, not watered down, but dry

  (I mean someday, at home—in Palestine)

  Then call it: “Ghetto Tears 1944.”

  Like “Henkel Dry” or “Tears of Magdalene,”

  This brand will gain renown

  Nor let its drinkers down

  There is no water in these tears,

  Just purest wine,

  The name itself is guarantee.

  “Vintage 1944.”

  And you must search the years long past

  And far ahead your eyes must cast

  To find that kind of tears

  So dry, and none with peers,

  As “Vintage 1944.”

  Theresienstadt, October 1, 1944

  One of the final opera premieres, La Serva Padrona, an opera buffa by Giovanni Batista Pergolesi, was performed in the Sokolovna auditorium. The conductor was Karel Berman, Rafael Schächter played the piano accompaniment, and, as Viktor Ullmann noted, “it was a pleasure to hear Hans Krása at the harpsichord.”1 Karel Švenk played the role of the servant Vespone, and Marion Podolier and Bedřich Borges gave brilliant performances as well. “It was the last premiere I was able to mount in cooperation with František Zelenka,” Karel Berman wrote in his memoirs. “Our ensemble was dissolved after three performances.”

  As on several previous occasions, Alice Herz-Sommer gave a solo concert of Chopin’s études in the town hall. “To play all twenty-four études in one evening is to take both a physical and an artistic risk,” Viktor Ullmann wrote. “These are, after all, ‘études,’ exercises for the development of Romantic piano technique. Alice Herz-Sommer is a justly admired pianist, short perhaps in stature but great in artistry, and her rendition of certain études was phenomenal, but the program as a whole is to be rejected.”2

  What Ullmann did not know and would never be able to learn was that this concert left a strong impression on many of those who heard it and would later survive the war. “We were gently lifted out of our narrow, starving Terezin and taken to another time and world,” Zdenka Fantlová said of this concert in her autobiography. “Sitting on a wooden bench I listened as if in a trance. Forever unforgettable!”3

  Alice’s playing remained unforgettable for Flaška as well. Indeed, for her it became a crucial inspiration. “The Chopin études by Alice Herz-Sommer left such a deep impression on me that I decided that very evening to become a pianist. And I did.”

  Meanwhile, in the cellar of L 411, rehearsals had begun for the chamber opera The Emperor of Atlantis, or the Refusal to Die, which Victor Ullmann had composed the previous year, basing it on a libretto by the young painter and poet Peter Kien. This allegorical ballad/opera about life and death and a tyrant named Overall reflects the inner spiritual revolt of its creators and of those who participated in the production.

  Shortly before the dress rehearsal in late summer 1944, the project was canceled. Paul Kling, the violin prodigy from Opava, who had just turned fifteen and was already part of the string quintet, had only vague memories of the moment. “No one knows just why the cancellation came about, whether the camp administration decided the premise was too risky, or the camp commandant himself prohibited it, or the Council of Elders ordered the production terminated—no one today can say. Someone at the time knew of course. But these people are no longer alive. I am almost the only one who survived, and I of course know the least, since I was the youngest.”4

  And so no one heard Death’s aria from The Emperor of Atlantis: “I am the gardener Death, I sow sleep in furrows plowed with pain. I am Death, the gardener Death, and pull up wilting weeds of weary creatures.”

  Only Verdi’s Requiem was heard one last time, sung by Rafael Schächter’s legendary choir—“Requiem aeternam, dona eis, Domine. Libera me.”

  The earth is red with blood

  The year advances wearily

  It is war

  My God, it is war

  The battlefields

  Overflow with blood

  The earth is so tired

  The moment of hopelessness

  Stands on the horizon

  Even the sun

  Shines through the blood

  And says:

  Brothers, stop

  Murdering one another!

  Have you not had enough of war

  Do you not know

  That you are human beings?

  There is no point

  In finding human beings

  If the wo
rld no longer exists

  The moon moves calmly across the sky

  And it too gazes in sadness down at the earth

  And says: God, do you not see

  How the world suffers

  Everything is bathed in blood!

  It is impossible to recover from this

  When the heart of humankind

  Is bullet-riddled.

  Handa Pollak, from her notebook, Všechno, 1944

  It was a period that alternated between hope and despair. When word spread through the ghetto that the Allied armies had successfully landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944, hope was on the rise. The end of the war no longer seemed far off. The overwhelming force of Allied troops was bearing down on the German Reich from all directions. In the West, the final phase of the liberation of France from four years of German occupation had begun. The Red Army was approaching from the East. In January it had reached the eastern border of Poland, and had been advancing in a steady series of offensives ever since. By the middle of August, the border of East Prussia had been reached, and the Red Army was headed in the direction of Warsaw and to the great bend in the Vistula. “Telegram from Stalin,” reads Otto Pollak’s diary. “ ‘Send ten million mattresses. Our soldiers are right at the border.’ ”

  But whenever hope budded spontaneously, it was always overshadowed by other ominous events and news. As before, the general mood was dominated by worries that were grimly confirmed when, on July 17, three boys fled from the ghetto, including, as Otto Pollak reports, “young Sklarek from Berlin. Presumably in reprisal, five renowned artists were arrested along with their families for defaming the ghetto and are confined in the Little Fortress.”

  The Theresienstadt painters’ affair left the ghetto in great agitation and even greater fear.5 Everyone knew these painters, especially Bedřich Fritta (Fritz Taussig), Otto Ungar, Felix Bloch, and Leo Haas, whose works are among the most valuable extant documents from the period of the Theresienstadt ghetto. Many people also knew Bedřich Fritta’s three-year-old son, “droll, chubby-cheeked Tommy,” whom Otto Pollak had often enjoyed entertaining. The child likewise vanished on July 17, leaving behind only gloomy forebodings.

  And yet—the pendulum continued to swing to the side of hope. Everything was in flux; there was no doubt that the Allied armies were advancing. The residents of Theresienstadt could see that with their own eyes. “The first swarm of silver birds, flying in the bright sunlight across the southwest,” Otto Pollak wrote on July 21, 1944, “were observed between eleven in the morning and one in the afternoon. The children in the Home watched the spectacle from their window on the third floor. We are caught up in indescribable excitement. (Children blew kisses at them.)”

  The next day a new rumor sent a wave of excitement through the ghetto. “AH succumbed to his wounds at two this afternoon,” Otto Pollak noted. The news of Stauffenberg’s attempted assassination of Hitler in the Führer’s headquarters in East Prussia on July 20 had found its way to Theresienstadt. The news that it had not succeeded was slower in getting through. As late as July 30, a mistaken version of the outcome of the attempt still prevailed, lifting everyone’s hopes. “In light of the good news,” Otto Pollak wrote on July 30, “a tide of good health is sweeping the ghetto.”

  Man at the Well, pencil drawing by Jo Spier

  By now the Allies were launching air raids day and night against German munitions depots, oil refineries, radar stations, V-1 launching pads, communication centers, transport facilities, and cities. “Twelve noon,” Otto Pollak wrote on August 24. “For the second time those shiny silver birds … in the east, moving southwestward.”

  The effect of such events was enormous. And now that the air-raid alarm was sounded once or twice a day, there were happy faces and optimistic conversations everywhere. Was it not obvious that the Germans would soon be defeated and would finally lay down their arms?

  People are blind and helpless

  And the good ones lie buried in the earth

  When will peace finally

  Fill the hearts of men?

  Open your eyes, you blind people

  Look upon it and do something

  To make the awful booming cloud of war

  Be swept away.

  And one day, perhaps

  All nations will shake hands

  They will triumph over evil

  And be friends again.

  And they will defend the truth

  And call out in their happiness:

  “Evil is banned;

  We no longer need to fight.”

  Handa Pollak, from her notebook, Všechno, 1944

  For prisoners wavering between hope and fear, the New Year’s message of the Jewish elder Paul Eppstein, issued on September 16, 1944, in the name of the Theresienstadt Council of Elders, must have seemed like an ominous tipping of the scales. Eppstein wished them all the best for the year 5705 of the Jewish calendar, and thanked them for the work achieved in the year just past and for their discipline in carrying out their duties. Then, as reported the next day in the Communications of the Jewish Self-Administration, he added: “In a time of great decisions that are changing the course of world history, when it has been our fate to live as if on an island, our own resiliency is crucial for us in shaping our lives and in recognizing our historic task of meeting our responsibilities for our community.”6

  “These times do not allow me to speak openly.” These words as well, according to an eyewitness account, were included in an address in which the chief elder fervently appealed to the ghetto residents for their trust. “I would nevertheless like to employ a comparison that may help you understand our current situation.” And he likened Theresienstadt to a ship nearing its harbor. “The harbor is, however, encircled with mines, and only the captain knows the course, which, though not direct, is the only one that will bring us safely into port.”7

  On Saturday, September 23, more swarms of silver birds passed over Theresienstadt. “Gazing at those airplanes coming from who knows how far away, Helga has been caught up in strong longings for her mother, which she told me about this evening, trying to hold back her tears,” Otto Pollak wrote, and then continued, “There is a rumor that during the Jewish holy days, 5,000 Jewish men between the ages of eighteen and fifty will be sent on two transports to D. How can the ghetto manage if nearly all the men capable of work have to leave? What lies behind such a measure?”

  The next day, the SS issued a written decree—in the Communications of the Jewish Self-Administration—that every resident of the ghetto needed to know:

  With a view to total employment of all forces, it has been decided … that opportunities for work needed to meet current demands in Theresienstadt will be expanded. Men capable of work will therefore be employed in priority tasks outside Theresienstadt, much as the “outside work brigades for constructing barracks” were employed. To this end, on Tuesday, September 26, and Wednesday, September 27, following instructions of the appropriate office, 2,500 men between ages sixteen and fifty-five will be processed each day and sent from the settlement to other districts of the Reich. … All such men must therefore immediately prepare for transport and assume they will be summoned.8

  The transport lists were now announced and the orders issued. Riesa, near Dresden, was the place of employment, at least according to the rumor that the SS had made a point of circulating. No one trusted such information anymore. People were aware of just one thing: A catastrophe had overtaken them.

  “The ghetto is caught up in great unrest, since in a few days so many men will be leaving their wives behind, fathers their children, sons their mothers,” Otto Pollak wrote on September 24. And a day later: “Helga is helping her chemistry professor, Miloš Salus, pack his things, since he has to leave on the transport, as does a teacher who, she says, always wears an ironic smile and whom she describes as an ‘elegantarium.’ Felix is saying his goodbyes, since he will be confined to holding barracks tomorrow. He is calm and composed.”9

&nbs
p; In all the uproar, only a few people noticed that sometime between three and four o’clock on the afternoon of September 27, Paul Eppstein vanished into a closed truck. He was taken to the Little Fortress and murdered that same day. No one in the ghetto learned of this, not even his wife, Hedwig, who came to the SS headquarters every day with a pot of food for him. “Gentlemen,” Heinrich Jöckel, the feared commander of the Little Fortress, who spared no effort to torture and murder his victims in the cruelest ways possible, said to his accomplices, “I expect you to maintain the strictest silence about this matter; it is an issue of far-reaching significance.”10

  One day later, at noon on September 28, 1944, Transport Ek was the first to leave, with 2,499 men on it. Engineer Otto Zucker, the designated “leader of the labor camp,” was on this transport, along with other members of the so-called staff of Theresienstadt. Almost without exception, those who left were men in their prime, among them the singer Karel Berman, the young violinists Paul Kling and Thomas Mandl, Rudolf Freudenfeld, who had directed Brundibár, and Karel Pollak, Handa’s father, whom the girls called Strejda. Their last moments together are burned forever into Handa’s memory:

  “The day before my father had to board the transport was Yom Kippur. We sat on the ramparts above the Cavalier Barracks—Tella, my father, and I. We talked about our life after the war. And we promised one another that when we were all reunited we would always observe Yom Kippur as a day of fasting. But my father never returned.”

  At eight o’clock that evening, Otto Pollak went to the sluice. Alongside the tracks, “four arc lamps on the side of the building illuminate the street bright as day. A locomotive with the second train of cars is pulling in. The first cars are large cattle cars refitted with big windows.”