“And then came the moment when five thousand men between twenty and fifty-five, in the best years of their adult lives, were sent away all at once,” Alice Herz-Sommer recalls. “Among them were my husband and the husband of my best friend, Edith Steiner-Kraus. That goodbye—it was a terrible shock for my son! I had to give my husband my word of honor that I would not volunteer for a transport. The transport pulled out, and then, only two days later, another transport was ordered and we were told: ‘Wives can now follow their husbands.’ ”
The SS circulated a flyer stating that only a limited number of family members would be allowed to join this labor transport that was so important for the war effort. So it was a labor camp after all? “Many of the women volunteered,” says Alice, “but my friend Edith and I did not.”
Five hundred women fell into the SS’s trap. They voluntarily joined two subsequent transports, El and Em, that left Theresienstadt on September 29 and October 1. Rahm and Haindl amused themselves—and not for the first time—by striking and cursing the prisoners in order to move them onto the cars more quickly.
Eichmann’s adjutant Ernst Möhs was already handing out typewritten lists of names with special instructions to the newly appointed chief elder, Dr. Benjamin Murmelstein. One of them stated that high-ranking officials in the ghetto administration, officials in the Jewish organizations, former officers in all armies, important inventors, and prominent individuals would also be transported.
Summonses were issued day and night without a pause for one whole month—almost nineteen thousand orders for transport. Hardly anyone was able to sleep now. The residents of the ghetto were petrified.
“They just wept, wept, wept. No one said a word. So many people were gone,” Marta Fröhlich says. “My older brother, Jenda, our protector, was gone. I almost left with him. Our counselor Eva Eckstein left voluntarily to be with her sister and her fiancé.”
“Most of my friends, boys and girls, went away,” Ela Stein says. “Honza Gelbkopf was gone, and nearly all the boys from Home 9. My uncle Otto left with the last transport on October 28. There was no time to say goodbye. There was no pause. Everything happened so quickly.”
“One transport after the other left,” Flaška recalls. “One girlfriend after the other left. Our counselors. My brother Michael left on September 28 and my sister Lizzi on October 19. I accompanied them as far as the sluice, which was forbidden and very dangerous. Sometimes people who weren’t on the list were shoved onto a car at the last moment and the doors were closed behind them.”
“You cannot imagine the kinds of things that happened there at the sluice,” says Eva Herrmann, who wore a red armband as a transport aide. “And it was organized so that everyone had to line up by number— everyone had a number. Then they walked toward the cars and the numbers were called out, from one to one thousand, to one thousand five hundred, to two thousand. … You had the feeling that as long as they were in the barracks they were still in Theresienstadt. But when they went out that gate—there stood the SS, who took charge with their shouting and stomping, with boots and clubs and everything else! If one of the older people didn’t move fast enough or there was someone with children—the scenes we were forced to watch were lessons in horror. People didn’t really know what was happening to them. They only knew that they were leaving, but didn’t know where they were headed.”11
Thursday, October 12, 1944 (Otto Pollak’s diary)
Sunny day. At eleven in the morning I manage with some difficulty to make my way to the Hamburg sluice. Last goodbyes with Marta and Fritz. Marta deeply touched. Weeping, she expresses her fear that we’ll not see each other again. Helga and I remain behind alone.
Sunday, October 15, 1944
The Hechts, Hugo, Grünbaum, Kopper, and Helga’s best friend Hanna Lissau are summoned. At three-thirty in the afternoon a difficult goodbye with the Hechts. With them I lose my last friends. From the steps I call out to them not to lose heart. Helga is on night duty and visits the Hechts at the sluice. I look out on the street early in the morning. The boarding of the cars is in high gear.
Monday, October 16, 1944
Around five in the morning Helga quietly enters the room. I turn on a light. My child, breaking into tears, reports that the train rolled out at five o’clock. The pain in Helga’s soul is very great. She stopped at Genie Barracks and watched the train pull out, until the last car was lost from sight. She saw Hugo being boarded on a litter and noticed how all the baggage of the blind was left behind.
Tuesday, October 17, 1944
Hugo’s will, made as he said goodbye on Sunday: My heirs are my brother’s three children. Amid his tears he told me this while gazing out the window. Another transport leaves tomorrow. Helga remarks about these summonses: “A single piece of paper decides a person’s fate.”
“I received my orders to be transported in October,” Eva Winkler recalls. “Just me. Not my mother, not my father. My father did everything he could to get me removed from the list. He went to the Council of Elders and told them either the whole family goes or I have to stay here. It was my good luck that my father was needed. I was already in the Hamburg Barracks. I can still see the lines of people with transport numbers on the tags around their necks, and I can hear them being called out, one, two, three … and then watching as people climb into the cattle cars. Then, at the last moment, my father arrived and pulled me off the transport.”
“It was one of the last transports in late October. And needless to say, as a fourteen-year-old girl, I was put on it alone,” says Vera Nath. “I wasn’t doing any important work. My sister was working at the Kursawe villa, my mother in the mica works,12 my father in the Kleiderkammer. Their work was very important. I received my summons for a transport leaving on Sunday, October 22, 1944. When they put me on the list my father went to Murmelstein and begged him to take me off the transport. And Murmelstein said, ‘You can go as well. You and your wife and your daughter.’ And he put us all on the transport list.
“We were in the sluice for two days, and our things were already loaded and our numbers had been called. As my father passed by Rahm, Rahm said, ‘Nath, what are you up to?’ My father said that I was on the transport and he couldn’t let me go alone. And Rahm said, ‘I need you. Stay here with your family’ And so we stayed.”
“My father didn’t even try to get us off the transport,” recalls Judith Schwarzbart, who also received her orders to be transported in late October. “My mother didn’t want him to. She hoped to see my brother Gideon again, who had left in May. And shortly before we left, my father called me to him—he probably guessed that he wouldn’t be coming back—and he said just these words to me: ‘Stay just as you are.’ And then we all boarded the transport.”
Of the girls in Room 28, the following boarded the October 1944 transports: Jiřinka Steiner and the counselor Eva Eckstein on October 1; Ruth Meisl on October 4; Ruth Gutmann on October 6; Eva Heller on October 12; Eva Fischl, Hana Lissau, and Maria Mühlstein on October 16; Emma Taub on October 19; Marta Kende, Helga Pollak, Handa Pollak, Eva Stern, and Marianne’s friend Hana Brady on October 23; Lenka Lindt and Judith Schwarzbart on October 28.
Room 28, all the Girls’ Homes, the Boys’ Homes, the Children’s Homes, the barracks, and all living quarters—they were all being emptied out, day after day. Left behind in the ghetto were the Danes, a few Dutch, women and girls who labored in the mica works, and those who, like Ela’s mother, worked in the fields under the Czech supervisor Karel Kursawe. Experts who were important to the SS and highly decorated or wounded veterans from the First World War, such as Leo Flach and Otto Pollak, also remained.
Transport summons dated October 22, 1944, from the papers of Otto Pollak
The dedications and good wishes in Flaška’s poetry album were left behind as well:
Just as this big mushroom protects the little mushroom, that’s how our Home protects us. But after a while we will have to protect others. And so prepare yourself, for you will hav
e to pay back the loan someday. Never reflect for long if you can do a good deed, and never lose hope. Without hope you cannot exist. And keep remembering those you were fond of. And never forget those who are like me.
Your Fiška
Terezin, October 5, 1944
Think back now and then to our Home in Theresienstadt and don’t be annoyed if I annoyed you sometimes.
Ruthka (Plzeň Bezovka 9)
Ruth Gutmann
October 5, 1944
Always remember our Room 28, think of what we learned there, what we strove for, and organize your life according to the rules that we learned there.
Tella
October 5, 1944
Dear Flaška,
Never forget what we have experienced together. The way we sang and dreamed, and the concerts with Baštík. Never forget what was beautiful about our Home. Good luck, and don’t upset your mother. Kisses from your
Maria Mühlstein
P.S.: Don’t be annoyed that I’ve written such nonsense. You wanted me to write something.
October 13, 1944
I am sorry, but I have to write similar thoughts for you as I wrote for the other girls. But you need to know that Theresienstadt was also a good school for us, despite all the bad things. You came here as a little child, without character, but under the influence of our Home you have acquired character. And I believe you have the will to be a good person.
Hana Lissau
October 14, 1944
Fiška’s entry in Flaška’s poetry album
There is no end. A new era always follows. Each person has his goal, and whoever wants to achieve that goal has a great many difficulties and a long struggle ahead. A person has to struggle in the face of adversity. People who have no will never achieve their goals. But if you keep up the struggle and never stop, even if you are defeated, you come closer to your goal. This struggle is the struggle of the will. Even an individual who is physically quite weak can have a strong will.
Eli Mühlstein
October 15, 1944
Human beings are in this world to do good. Anyone who does not abide by that has no right to be a human being. If you want to fulfill your mission on this earth, act accordingly and live by the principles that Tella has taught us. Whenever you’re in doubt, think back to what she would have done. I believe that she is the most flawless person I know.
In memory of my sweetheart,
Lenka Lindt
October 15, 1944
Helga’s entry in Flaška’s poetry album
Always remember, dear Flaška, that there were times here in Theresienstadt when we lived lazily through each day and never gave up hope that peace will come.
Handa Pollak
Dear Flaška!
I hope that we will see each other again out in beautiful nature, where everything is fresh and fragrant, where we can breathe free and realize our ideas and not live as we did here in this prison cell. And when we are older and a little wiser, there will perhaps come an evening when the stars shine in a dark sky, lending the sea its silvery luster, and we shall sit beside the shore and think of our friends and the cares that we once had so many years before in Theresienstadt.
Helga
October 22, 1944
“After the transports left that autumn, we came back to our room one evening and didn’t know what to do. Almost all the girls, all the counselors were gone. It was eerie in the ghetto,” Ela Stein recalls. “A lot of the windows stood wide open, and many of the rooms were completely empty.”
“The last days in Room 28 were very depressing. All our friends were gone. The Home stood almost empty, the whole ghetto felt deserted,” Marianne Deutsch recalls. “Nothing functioned anymore. And then Willy Groag came and told us that whoever had parents or someone else in the family should move in with them.”
“All the bunks were empty,” says Flaška. “And at the end there were only four of us in the room. So we took down our flag and cut it into quarters, and each of us took one. And we promised each other that after the war, when we all met up again, we would sew it back together as a symbol of our friendship.”
Ela, her mother, and her sister moved into a building that housed many of the people who worked in agriculture. They were given a small room with enough mattresses to go around, and they could arrange things relatively comfortably. The 18,402 prisoners who had gone with the transports had to leave many possessions behind. There were now only about 11,000 people living in Theresienstadt.
It took a while for the ghetto, which had come to a standstill, to be reorganized and begin functioning again. Only a few hundred men capable of work had remained in the camp, among them Willy Groag and the fathers of Marianne Deutsch, Vera Nath, and Eva Winkler. Women took over the jobs of the deported men, and children did the work of adults. Flaška, who moved in with her parents in the Magdeburg Barracks, worked in the fields at one point, then in the mica factory, and for a while as an errand girl for the administration. Marianne and Marta, like most of the children, were assigned agricultural jobs, but they did all sorts of other work whenever the need arose.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Liberation
November 8, 1944 (from Otto Pollak’s diary)
On awakening, the first snow. Meet with Marianne Deutsch, Helga’s friend from Room 28. She tells how she got out of being transported. How her father intervened so that M. gave P. the order to switch papers. In fifteen minutes she was off the list.
November 19, 1944
Four weeks ago today Helga entered the sluice. Quarter after nine, last goodbye from my child.
November 20, 1944
Forty-nine Dutch arrive, nothing but rags and neglect. Most don’t know their own names or where they have come from.
November 22, 1944
Spent a bad night, constantly thinking of my child. Does she have all her things? Is she perhaps freezing? This morning at six, as a kind of symbol, a young black and white kitten came running into the room; wouldn’t leave my side.
In mid-November 1944, the commandant ordered that urns with ashes of those who had died be disposed of. The task was assigned to a group of about twenty children, among them Ela Stein and thirteen-year-old Horst Cohn from Berlin. As one of the boys who had hauled the wagon for corpses and bread through Theresienstadt, he was immune to death.
“Death didn’t frighten us,” he recalls, “and certainly the ashes of the dead didn’t. We knew that there was a crematorium where the dead were incinerated, and that the ashes had been kept. We knew that each corpse was burned individually. It was pushed in at one end by a Jewish prisoner; the temperature was close to forty-five hundred degrees. Everything burned, even the bones. And at the other end stood another prisoner with an iron pole, who swept out the ashes, put them in a cardboard box, and closed it up. Next to him was someone who filled out the label: name, place of birth, date of birth, date of death.”1
And now these children were to see those boxes, the urns of the dead of Theresienstadt, with their own eyes and feel them with their own hands—thirty thousand boxes, stacked on shelves that reached from floor to ceiling, all in strict alphabetical order.
“The moment I entered the columbarium,” Horst says, “my eyes were drawn almost magnetically to the letter H—my grandparents were named Heller. And I walked over and in the very same moment I spotted two boxes side by side, at eye level. One read ‘Gustav Heller,’ the other ‘Ettel Heller’—my grandpa and my grandma!”
Upon his arrival in Theresienstadt in May 1943, Horst had found his grandparents in the last stages of starvation. They had begged him for something to eat, and he had been unable to help them. A few days later they both died, on the same day, in separate hospital rooms. Their grandson had felt both shock and relief. “Because they were released now from the agony of starvation,” he says. “It is one of the worst torments a human being can know.” He continues:
I grabbed both boxes, took Grandpa and Grandma under my arms, and kept them there whi
le I loaded other boxes on the wagon outside. No one said a word. None of the other children had bothered with the names.
Then the wagon started to move and I helped pull, but always with both boxes firmly under my arms. Then we came to the Eger, where we were ordered to open the boxes and empty the ashes into the river. We formed a chain and passed the urns from hand to hand. But I was standing down at the river and emptied the ashes of my grandpa and grandma into the river with my own hands. I’m glad I did. I buried them with my own hands. And I watched as the ashes from all those boxes spread out into the river, watched the river carry them away. And the Eger flows into the Elbe, and the Elbe flows into the North Sea, and the North Sea merges with all the oceans of the world. And I know that Grandpa and Grandma circle the world forever and ever. They are there. They will always be there for me. In my mind, the spot where I emptied their ashes into the river is my grandparents’ cemetery.
By the end of the war some thirty thousand Jewish prisoners had been
incinerated in the crematory that stood in the Jewish cemetery.
Their ashes were kept in cardboard urns.
During the late autumn of 1944—it was already very cold—the Germans ordered some of their young prisoners to carry out another special job. Ela Stein was among them. “We were supposed to help them hunt. They gave us two sticks and chased us out into the cold water, where the animals were swimming—I think they were pheasants—and we had to drive them off. And when they flew away, the Germans shot them. It was Rahm and Haindl and a couple other SS men. I think they had visitors from Prague. We had to do this for a long time. There we stood in the ice-cold water. Some girls were very ill afterward.”
Ela was lucky, because her mother, Markéta, did all she could to keep her healthy. Markéta was a thoroughly practical woman and was assigned to all kinds of work. Now and then she managed to “organize” food of one sort or another—cautiously and at great risk. Sometimes she made pickles for the SS, sometimes she plucked geese for them. And when the sheep from Lidice—they had been brought to Theresienstadt after the massacre in May 1942—were slaughtered in the winter of 1944, she helped butcher the meat and was able to smuggle a piece of it into her room. She preserved most of it in fat. “ ‘We’ll keep that for the day our family and friends return. They’ll need it,’ my mother always said. And we began to save all sorts of things for that moment.”
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