You and I, what friends we are
You and I, how close we are
Theresienstadt is where we met
And there shook hands
You and I what friends we are
Something we’ll not forget.
You and I, what friends we are
You and I, how close we are
One day the gate will open wide
The night will pass, the sun will rise
You and I, what friends we are
Our friendship will abide.3
Judith Schwarzbart arrived in Auschwitz on October 28, 1944, along with her parents, Julius and Charlotte Schwarzbart, and her sister, Ester. At the first selection upon their arrival, she saw her father for the last time. A few days later, she was loaded onto a work transport together with her mother and sister and two thousand others. The trip lasted two to three days, and then they arrived at Kurzbach, a small town in southwestern Poland, north of Wroclaw. “There we had to dig trenches to stop tanks,” she recalls.
These were deep ditches, and it was very cold, and all we had on were summer dresses. Somehow we managed it in November, but then it turned so cold that the ground froze. It was terribly hard to get a shovel into it—we had already dug very deep holes. It got colder and colder. We were given some sort of coats. Most were old rags, too long for some, too short for others, and wooden slippers.
We were housed in wooden barns, a thousand women to a barn. We had only a light blanket—and it was the middle of the winter! When our shoes got wet, they stayed wet, and we had to work with wet feet. When it began to snow they sent us into the forest, where we had to drag whole trees to the trenches in order to camouflage them. I don’t think they were ever used, because it was already too late. There was an SS man there, a sadist. The women knew that I was fourteen, and so they always sent me into the middle, where the work wasn’t as hard. But the SS man kept calling me out and putting me up front, where it was hardest. The dragging left me with a bad back that I still have today.
I don’t remember what they gave us to eat; it certainly wasn’t much. I think there was no breakfast all, and a watery soup in the evening—after working ten hours in the freezing cold. One evening I slipped out into the fields and hid some corn in my blouse—I was lucky no one caught me. I was always hungry. And once as we were marching along a street four abreast, I saw a door open and someone threw us something. I picked it up—it was a piece of bread, and we shared it. You simply can’t imagine what that piece of bread meant to us!
One day we suddenly heard detonations and shots nearby. We hoped the front line was getting closer and that we would soon be liberated. But we were wrong. It was mid-January 1945, and instead of sending us to work they sent us off into who knew where. It was freezing, there was snow everywhere, and we marched on foot for days. At night we were herded into barns or pigsties that had already been abandoned. We didn’t get anything to eat, but in the empty sties we almost always found some potatoes or turnips intended for the pigs. We didn’t care. The main thing was we had something to eat. And it was warm in the stalls. All the same, many women died on the way.
Finally we arrived in Gross-Rosen. We were brought to the washrooms, and were given different clothes and something to eat. Then they loaded us onto cattle cars, and our journey into the unknown continued. At the train station in Weimar the train came to a halt, and bombs fell from the sky. It was dreadful. The cars were sealed, we couldn’t get out, and the station was in flames. The Germans guarding us jumped from the train and took cover under the cars, while there we were in open cars watching airplanes diving at us with a hellish racket and dropping their bombs directly overhead. Horrible. You just can’t imagine it. Three women in our car died.4 I don’t know if they died of shock or from bomb fragments. The corpses stayed in the car until we reached Bergen-Belsen.
If until then I had thought that nowhere could be more horrible than where I was, I was mistaken. The worst was Bergen-Belsen. No human being can imagine what Bergen-Belsen was, what it was like there! It was a starvation chamber. We got a ladleful of water once a day, with a few tiny pieces of turnip floating in it—and that was for three people, plus a slice of bread for each. In the morning, again for three people, there was a ladleful of “coffee”—some dark fluid. We sometimes fought—over a piece of turnip! Can anyone imagine that—fighting over a piece of turnip? I’m ashamed of myself now—but that’s how it was. We fought over every spoonful of soup! We didn’t fight because we were angry with each other, but over a turnip, over a spoonful of soup.
We lay three to a wooden bunk. People were dying all around us, dying en masse. What an awful thing to be speaking to someone who suddenly falls over dead—it’s indescribable. A woman I knew, Suse Hoffmann from Brno, who was the same age as my brother, died right beside me—fell over dead. And once again, roll calls—where we stood outside for hours, no matter what the weather. All I can say is that I am here thanks to my mother and sister. I don’t know how often I fainted during those roll calls. Sometimes my mother braced me up from behind, sometimes my sister, so that I wouldn’t fall over and end up in sick bay. No one came back from there.
It was mid-April 1945 when the Germans fled. They didn’t even leave us watery soup or a piece of bread. When the British arrived, we heard that the Germans had prepared bread for distribution, but that the camp elders had forbidden the handing out of the bread. It was handed out in one barracks—and they all died because the bread had been poisoned by the Germans, or so it was said. That’s what I was told. I don’t know if the story is true or not.
At any rate, for those last twenty-four hours, we didn’t have any bread or any water—nothing. I wanted to drink from the well, but there were many, many people around it, because it was the only one. There were fights and brawls, and you couldn’t possibly get through. It was only later that I learned that many people came down with typhoid as a result of drinking the water.
We left the camp in April, and we ate the buds off the trees. I told my sister, “Come here, eat it. It’s wonderful. It tastes like almonds.” Bergen-Belsen was a horrible camp. I don’t know whether enough is known about it. The only thing people know is what was filmed, the footage that the British made. Those truckloads of corpses with dangling arms and legs—that was Bergen-Belsen.
On April 16, 1945—in the presence of leading representatives of the Hungarian Jewish Relief and Rescue Committee (Va’ad Ezra V’hatzolah) and a negotiator named Reszo (Rudolf) Kastner5—Eichmann’s henchmen Hermann Krumey and Otto Hunsche delivered to camp commandant Karl Rahm orders from Himmler to surrender Theresienstadt without a fight. Rahm, Kastner reports, was thoroughly surprised. His comment upon hearing Himmler’s orders was, “I no longer understand this world.”6
The German front lines had fallen apart, the camps in the East were liberated, one after the other; the great retreat had begun—prisoners, soldiers, SS, refugees of every sort streamed toward the West. But the Allies had not yet reached Theresienstadt, and despite Himmler’s orders, the SS saw no reason to give up their control of the camp. And so they were still there when the first prisoners from the death camps in the East reached Theresienstadt.
“Dear God, what is happening here; I can’t even describe it,” Eva Ginz, Hanka’s friend from Prague, wrote in her diary on April 23. “One afternoon [Friday, April 20] I was at work, when we saw a freight train passing. People stuck their heads out of the windows. They looked simply awful. Pale, completely yellow and green in the face, unshaven, like skeletons, sunken cheeks, their heads shaved, in prisoners’ clothes … and their eyes were glittering so strangely … from hunger. I immediately ran into the ghetto (we were working outside) to the station. They were just getting out of the trucks, if you could call what they did getting out. Only a few managed to keep on their feet (their legs were just shanks covered with skin); the rest were lying completely exhausted on the floor of the trucks. They had been on the road for a fortnight and had been given almost nothing to
eat. They were coming from Buchenwald and from Auschwitz… . Then one transport after the other began to arrive. Hungarians, French, Slovaks, Poles (they had been in concentration camps for seven years) and some Czechs as well.”7
“One very cold day in April 1945,” Eva Herrmann recalls, “thousands of people arrived. Many of them were wearing wooden slippers. When so many people in wooden shoes are moving along slowly it makes a dreadful noise, a kind of monotone clacking sound. We heard it at times during the night. And so we got up and followed the noise and watched and waited until the people arrived. We could see that there were all kinds of people from everywhere. They looked awful.”
“We heard shots in the distance,” Flaška remembers. “We thought the army would be moving in. But it was the poorest of the poor who arrived, specters. It was horrible—many of them simply fell down on the street and lay there. They were emaciated, sick, starved, just rags on their bodies.”
“In April 1945, people from the death marches began coming back,” says Ela. “At first it was just men. But then one day a transport with women arrived, and we asked them where they had come from, and they didn’t know themselves! From then on I always stood and watched when people came back. They always passed by where we were working. They could barely walk! They just dragged themselves along, they looked so horrible, like skeletons—completely starved, exhausted.”
“I was standing on the street beside Kursawe when the first prisoners from the concentration camps came back,” recalls Willy Groag. “They were in an inhuman condition, just skin and bones, their heads shaved. I was horrified; we were all horrified. And I can still see how terrified Kursawe looked. It really was incomprehensible. We couldn’t believe that these were our friends, our closest friends.”
“The town’s heart stood still,” Alice Ehrmann noted in her diary on April 20, 1945. “And now they’re here. Stinking, vermin-ridden cattle cars, with stinking, vermin-ridden people in them, half alive, half dead, or corpses. They were pressed to the windows, horrible faces, bones and eyes. What had kept us trembling in fear, for months, was coming directly toward us.”8
“When new people arrived,” Marianne Deutsch recalls, “my father, who worked in the Central Registry, had to enter people’s names in the files. And so he went out to these people and had a kettle of soup brought out to them. They fell on it like madmen. And my father said, ‘They must be from an insane asylum,’ and sent for doctors. The doctors determined that they were normal people, but that they had been through horrible things.”
It was not just that these people had survived the death camps. Shortly before the Allies reached the camps, the SS had driven them westward, in the direction of concentration camps at Gross-Rosen, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and Mauthausen. But those camps were by then terribly overcrowded and the roads could not handle such a huge stream of refugees. The SS didn’t know what to do with their prisoners, so they would ruthlessly shoot and kill those who could not keep moving or who had caught their eye for whatever reason. Finally they started directing some of these “death marches” toward Theresienstadt.
On April 22, 1945, Benjamin Murmelstein, who still held the post of chief elder, let it be known that Paul Dunant, a delegate of the International Red Cross, had been present at a meeting of the Council of Elders. He had formally announced that the Theresienstadt camp could count on help from the Red Cross and that he was commissioned to establish and maintain a direct and permanent connection with that institution. “This is in fact the expected takeover by the Red Cross, even though the Germans are still here,” Erich Kessler wrote in his diary that day.9 The hour of liberation was now palpably near.
But there was still one last ordeal to face at Theresienstadt. The SS was still running the camp. Even though they were getting ready to pick up and leave, carting away everything that could be carted away, and even though their ranks were gradually diminishing, the hard core— Hans Günther, Karl Rahm, Rudolph Haindl, Ernst Möhs—was still there. Using whatever authority they still exercised, they blocked any help being offered to those returning and prevented emergency measures from being taken, such as inoculations to stop typhoid and other epidemics from spreading to the rest of the population. It was impossible to isolate the sick from the healthy. Medicines were in short supply, there were too few nurses, and there was not enough food for the approximately thirteen thousand thoroughly exhausted people who had been arriving since April. Many of them died shortly before liberation became a reality.
Hanka Wertheimer and her mother had been transported to Hamburg in July 1944 with a working brigade. Along the way several cars were uncoupled and shunted in a different direction. Miriam Rosenzweig and the counselor Eva Weiss were in one of them, and they were sent to Christianstadt, a secondary camp at Gross-Rosen not far from Wroclaw. Hanka, however, ended up in Hamburg. The city had been badly ravaged by bombs, and the women were put to work clearing rubble and rebuilding.
Hanka recalls:
We were given a special uniform, beige overalls and a pastel blue headscarf. And that’s how we marched through the streets. We were always five abreast and sometimes sang songs like “After Every December Comes the Month of May.”
Of course the residents of Hamburg had to be given some explanation about who we were, and so they were told we were convicts and came from a prison. That’s how we were presented—as criminals, as murderers and thieves. That’s what was printed in the newspaper, too.
We built streets in a new settlement in Hamburg-Neugraben. Sometimes we scavenged for food in garbage cans and made soup of it—we had a place to cook. When people saw us looking for scraps in their garbage, they sometimes put out something edible for us, wrapping it in newspaper and laying it next to the garbage cans, and then we’d find maybe a potato, or an onion, or a piece of bread. Then we’d cook our soup. Those were the best soups!
We had a guard from the Wehrmacht. He was very fat and, in comparison to the others, very nice. We even called him Papa.10 I remember a Frau Schmidt as well. She had read in the paper that we were criminals. And my mother, who spoke very good German, told her, “Do you believe everything in the paper is true? Do you believe that my thirteen-year-old daughter killed somebody or committed some other awful crime?”
The “Wehrmacht Papa,” who guarded us all by himself, let us speak with people a little, and so gradually we came into contact with the local population. A lot of us could speak German. Gradually people realized that we weren’t criminals. And many of those who had had their homes bombed and had very little left themselves were really quite nice to us.
I think we were in three different places in Hamburg—in Veddel, in Neugraben, and in Tiefstack, which were all camps attached to Neuengamme. For a while we worked in an oil factory. I remember that we got a very good soup every day at noon. The soup was so good because there were other workers in the bombed-out factories we were there to repair—Germans, French, Italians, all prisoners of war. Good soup was sent to these factories, and we were given some of it. It tasted wonderful… .
We were always closely guarded, of course. One day, the SS men found a letter one of us was trying to smuggle out. It had been written by a Hana. All the Hanas had to step forward. My mother was terribly frightened for my sake and told me, “You stay here, because your real name is Hanneliese.” They found the Hana they wanted. They shaved her head and sent her to Auschwitz.
Winter came on, and it turned very cold. We didn’t have any stockings and wore wooden shoes that let the snow in. Many of us got sick. And our overalls were all that we had. I don’t even know if we ever washed them. I only know that there were frequent air-raid alarms. The British dropped bombs, the Americans dropped bombs, and large sections of Hamburg lay in ruin and ashes.
I was always happy when there was an air-raid alert—because I thought that every bomb brought the end of the war just that much closer. We often fled to an aboveground bunker. These buildings weren’t really meant
for us prisoners. But the Germans who guarded us couldn’t leave us by ourselves. So they took us along. And we were always put on the top, the eighth floor, where it was most dangerous, of course. The Germans were right below us, so that we couldn’t run away.
I liked going to the bunker. I could finally get some real sleep. I was always very, very tired—I remember that. We usually had to get up very early to go to work. And we came back late in the evening. I got far too little sleep. But if there were bombs, I could get some real sleep. It’s strange—I was probably too tired to be afraid. And too young. I told myself, “I haven’t committed any crime; why should anything happen to me?” What I really wanted to do was stay in my bunk and sleep. But sometimes my mother would make me join her in the basement, where we were better protected. Nothing ever happened to us, although sometimes bombs fell very close… . Then in April 1945, we were taken to Bergen-Belsen… . It’s really not that far away. But it took us seven days by train, because so many trains were going to Bergen-Belsen. Hundreds of cars, thousands of prisoners from every point on the compass… .
“In late April there were suddenly hundreds of people returning to Theresienstadt,” Ela says, describing all this as if it had happened yesterday. “I was on the lookout for familiar faces. Suddenly I recognized my friend Helga, and I called out, ‘Helga! Helga!’ I flung off my wooden shoes, which were much too big for me, and ran to her father and shouted, ‘Helga is here! Helga is here!’ I bellowed it like a madwoman and ran back so that I wouldn’t lose sight of Helga and could greet her before she had to be put under quarantine, because they were all ill. And so I found my Helga again.”
“I heard Ela shouting,” Helga recalls. “She couldn’t get to us because we were separated from everyone else right away and led to the West Barracks. While we were standing there waiting to see what would happen next, a distant relative suddenly came up and brought me a bag of something to eat that my father had sent—my father couldn’t walk very fast and so had sent his cousin. No sooner had we reached in for a bite than the bag was gone. Some Polish and Slovak women standing next to us simply ripped it from our hands.”
The Girls of Room 28 Page 30
