The Girls of Room 28

by Hannelore Brenner

  Eva lived in London for many years and now resides near Winchester in the south of England.

  HANKA (CHANA) WERTHEIMER only barely survived the hell of Bergen-Belsen. Fourteen thousand people died there in just the first five days after liberation which had occurred on April 15, 1945 and another fourteen thousand perished in the weeks that followed, among them Hanka’s mother, Lily Wertheimer, who succumbed to typhus on May 16, 1945.

  Hanka Wertheimer

  Weingarten

  Hanka remained in a hospital in Celle, Germany, until July 1945, and was then moved to a hospital in Plzeň. With her strength for the most part restored, she traveled on to Prague. “I went directly to Žitná 38,” Hanka remembers. “Our Mařka was still living in the same little bachelor flat. She broke down in tears when she saw me. If she had met me on the street, she said, she wouldn’t have recognized me. I weighed only seventy-seven pounds, and was ill and deeply unhappy.”

  Hanka had lost almost her entire family apart from her sister, who had been able to make it to Palestine in time, as did her mother’s brother. Of her father’s eleven siblings, only two brothers had been able to save themselves by emigrating to South America.

  Mařka gave back to Hanka the apartment that Hanka’s mother had once rented in Mařka’s name. It was not far from Wenceslas Square and soon became a regular meeting place for Hanka’s friends: Handa Pollak, Ela Stein, Eva Seger, Stepan Krulis, Yehuda Huppert (Polda), and Jirka Brady, the brother of little Hana, who had perished in Auschwitz.1

  In the first years after liberation it seemed unimaginable to Hanka and her friends that they could ever be friends with people who had not been through what they had. They could not picture marrying anyone who was not one of them. Images of the camps stayed alive in their minds for a long time. “It was such a strong force inside us,” Hanka says. “While we were in the camps, when we closed our eyes we saw bread. After the war, when we closed our eyes, we saw the concentration camp.”

  Hanka and her friends often walked along the Old City Ring, past the Tyn Church, to the Old Town Hall with its astronomical clock, always keeping an eye out for some familiar soul who might suddenly emerge from the crowd. She thought about her friend Polda, but she could not bring herself to start a search—for fear that she would receive bad news. Then one day Polda crossed her path, and Hanka was happy to see him again and to know he was alive.

  Hanka’s time in Prague after liberation proved short. Handa Pollak and she had just enrolled in school when Hanka was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She was placed in a sanatorium that was run by Zionists in Davos, Switzerland, where the beds were intended solely for members of the Zionist organization Hechalutz. She remained there for more than two years, during which time she attended middle school. In 1948 she returned to Prague.

  In the meantime, her friends had moved off in various directions. Jirka went to America and Stepan to Australia; Ela, Handa, Eva, and Polda immigrated to Palestine. In 1949 Hanka also found her way at last to the place she had so long yearned for—Israel.

  In Kibbutz Hachotrim Hanka met her future husband, with whom she spent many interesting years in places as varied as the United States, Bulgaria, Singapore, India, and Italy. She has three sons and now lives with her husband in Tel Aviv.

  JUDITH SCHWARZBART and her sister, Ester, also escaped the “death mills” of Bergen-Belsen (to use the title of director Billy Wilder’s 1945 documentary). Like Hanka, they lost their mother shortly after liberation. Charlotte Schwarzbart died in a hospital in Celle, Germany, on May 5, 1945.

  Judith Schwarzbart

  Rosenzweig

  In mid-July 1945 Judith and her sister returned to their Moravian homeland. Their brother, Gideon, was waiting for them in their parents’ house in Brno-Jundrov. He had found the house uninhabited and stripped of its furniture, apart from some things he discovered smashed and shattered in the courtyard. Except for a Passover plate and an old clock, which neighbors gave back to them, there was nothing left of their parents’ possessions.

  The three siblings—Ester, nineteen; Gideon, seventeen; and Judith, fifteen—were on their own. Their parents and other relatives had perished. They were receiving just enough government money to get by. They attended school, but the cold winter of 1945–46 was a terrible one. “We did our homework,” Judith recalls. “My sister was studying for her graduation exams, and I can still see how a glass of water, which was always at her side and which we always kept wrapped in a cloth, turned to ice—that’s how cold it was. There was no wood or coal. I would have emigrated right then if I could have. But my brother and sister held me back until I was eighteen. I finished high school, moved to Hachsharah [a program/community that prepared people for immigration to Israel], and then on to Palestine in 1948.”

  At six o’clock in the morning on May 15, 1948, Judith arrived in the harbor of Jaffa, on one of the first three ships to dock in the newly founded state of Israel. They were greeted by rounds of gunfire coming from Arab planes that swept over the harbor. That was the beginning of her new life.

  When one of Judith’s aunts who had immigrated to Palestine before the war asked her what had actually happened to her, Judith began to relate her experiences. But no sooner had she started than she was interrupted by these words from her aunt: “Oh, don’t start exaggerating. It can’t have been that bad.” And so for decades Judith said nothing about those times. She became a pediatric nurse and married in 1951. She has three children and makes her home in Haifa.

  EVA WINKLER experienced the end of the war with her parents and her brother Jiři in Switzerland. In July 1945 they returned to their home, first to Miroslav and then to Brno. They, too, waited in vain for the return of other family members. “It was a terrible time,” she says. “The war was over, and we then learned what had happened—that my grandparents, almost all of my aunts and uncles and their children, and many of my friends had not survived the Holocaust.”

  Over the next few years Eva attended school in Miroslav and Brno and graduated from a technical high school. She never really felt at home again in Czechoslovakia. “There were many Czechs who had collaborated with the Germans. Anti-Semitism lived on. I had a teacher who made things unpleasant for me because he couldn’t bear the fact that I, as a Jew, was the best in the class. I also often had a feeling I was being followed, that someone was walking behind me.”

  Eva Winkler Sohar

  In 1949 she and her brother immigrated to Israel. Her parents had hoped to follow them. But then came Communist rule, the Iron Curtain, and the borders were closed. Not until the death of Eva’s father in 1968 did her mother move to Israel with her youngest son, Pavel.

  Eva spent several years in Kibbutz Hachotrim, the same kibbutz where Hanka and Handa lived. She married, had two children, and now lives with her husband in Haifa.

  At her first opportunity, MARTA FRÖHLICH traveled with her brothers and sisters to Pisek, where her mother still lived. “She was wearing a lovely pink dress when we arrived,” Marta recalls. “She was crazy with happiness! She kissed us and danced with us.”

  Marta Fröhlich Mikul

  But no sooner had her father returned from Theresienstadt than he started making trouble and was again abusive to his wife and children. Only after Jenda, who was now eighteen years old, returned home in September 1945 and resolutely stood up to his father did these violent episodes become less frequent. But there was no changing their father. All four of Marta’s siblings immigrated to Israel in the late 1940s. Marta alone remained behind with her mother, whom she loved dearly. Marta married, has three children, and now lives in Cheb.

  VERA NATH, along with other children from Theresienstadt, including Flaška, arrived in Štiřin, Lojovice, on June 6, 1945. The Christian humanist Přemysl Pitter had turned an old castle there into a sanatorium for children.2 After a few weeks, Vera returned with her parents and sister to Prague, where they searched in vain for other relatives who might be alive. The trail for most of them ended in Auschwitz and L
odz. Only two cousins had been able to immigrate to Palestine in time. Her mother’s older brother, Eugen Kolb, a well-known Zionist from Budapest, had been aboard the Kastner Transport to Switzerland in late 1944 and later made his way to Israel.3

  Vera Nath Kreiner

  On October 28, 1948, Vera left for Israel, and was followed by her parents a few months later. She married, has two children, and now lives with her husband in Ramat Gan.

  ELA STEIN lived for a while with her aunt in Kolín, and then joined her mother and sister in Prague. Only a few members of her large extended family survived the Holocaust— sixty-two of them were among its victims, including her uncle Otto Altenstein.

  Ela Stein Weissberger

  “After the war I was terribly afraid that I could not be like other children,” Ela remembers, “that they would all point at me and say, ‘Look, she was in a concentration camp.’ But I wanted more than anything to go to school again. I wanted to learn. Even today I still tell children, ‘Don’t tell me you don’t like school.’ For me the most wonderful thing was to attend school again, to sit on a school bench and listen to the teacher without fear.”

  In 1949 Ela was able to fulfill her long-standing wish to immigrate to Israel. There she served in the army for two years, married in 1953, and moved with her husband to the United States in 1958. She has two children and lives in New York State. In recent years, performances of Brundibár have brought her all across the United States, where she is an honored guest as an eyewitness to history. She has made it her mission to keep alive the memory of her friends from Theresienstadt.

  MARIANNE DEUTSCH was happy beyond belief finally to rejoin Memme, her governess. She lived in Olomouc with her parents and Memme for several years, attending a commercial high school and then pursuing her profession. She married in 1954 and moved to Ostrava with her husband. But before the Soviet Union and its allies could march into Prague in August 1968, bringing the Prague Spring to an abrupt end, she and her husband decided to leave their home and take their ten-year-old son, Peter, with them. “We didn’t want to make the same mistake our parents had, who didn’t take ‘little corporal Hitler’ seriously,” she says. “We didn’t want our children to grow up with their spirits broken. So we left everything behind, apart from two suitcases, and fled to what was then West Germany, by way of Austria.” There Marianne and her family built a new life for themselves.

  MIRIAM ROSENZWEIG was liberated from Bergen-Belsen in 1945. Seriously ill with typhoid, she was hospitalized for a few weeks and then taken to Sweden, where she spent a year in a hospital recovering from tuberculosis. She then returned to Prague and immigrated to Israel in 1948. She also lived at Kibbutz Hachotrim for a while and, later, in Haifa. She married, and in 1959 moved with her husband and two sons to California, where a third son was born. She lives, as she says, a pleasant life in Orange County. “I don’t concern myself with the past much,” she says. “But now that the youngest of us are growing old, like many others I feel that our past should not be forgotten. We kept silent for many years. But now the time has come to speak about our experiences during the war, before it is too late.”

  Miriam

  Rosenzweig Jung

  EVA ECKSTEIN lost her mother and her two sisters, Hana and Herta, in Auschwitz. She was transported from Auschwitz to Freiburg, near Dresden, where she was put to work in the airplane industry. After the deadly air raid on Dresden in February 1945, the prisoners were loaded onto open cattle cars and transported in the direction of Czechoslovakia. After a week’s journey with almost nothing to eat, they arrived somewhere near Plzeň, where the train halted for a long time. Over the objections of the SS, local women forced their way over to the prisoners, demanded that the cattle-car doors be opened, and brought soup to the starving women. The journey continued and finally came to an end at the Austrian concentration camp of Maut hausen, which was already under the protection of the Red Cross and was liberated by the Americans on May 4.

  Eva Eckstein Vit

  Eva returned alone to her hometown of Louny, where she found nothing as it had been. The grocery store and the house that her parents had owned ended up in the hands of collaborators. In 1946 her fiancé, Hermann, reappeared, and they were married a year later. Eva lived in Louny with him and their two children through all the difficulties of the Communist regime. In 1968, while Soviet tanks were putting an end to the reforms of the Prague Spring, she and her husband seized the opportunity to leave the country on a tourist visa to Sweden. Sweden became their new homeland, and Eva still lives there today

  EVA STERN lost nearly her entire family in the Holocaust. She and her sister Doris eventually immigrated to Israel, where she now lives. An abyss lies between her current life and the years between 1939 and 1945, about which she prefers not to speak.

  EVA LANDA’s odyssey did not come to an end with the war’s end on May 8, 1945. Leaving Gutau, the Polish village where she was liberated by the Red Army in January 1945, she was first taken, still half frozen, to a military hospital in Eylau, in what had been German East Prussia. In April 1945 the hospital was closed, and she was sent farther to the east, eventually ending up in Sysran, an old Russian town on the Volga, not far from Kujbyšev, which is now called Samara.

  On that journey, Eva met a man who would change her life: Dr. Mer, the head of the train’s medical staff and a major in the Soviet army. He took a great interest in his patients, especially in Eva, whom he immediately took to his heart. Dr. Mer, himself a Jew, had lost his parents to the Nazis and lived with his wife in Leningrad. They had no children.

  He decided to adopt Eva. “He suggested it to me at once,” Eva recalls. “But I didn’t want any part of it. I wanted to return to Prague. He told me I had no home in Prague, that I would be put in an orphanage. We were en route for almost three weeks, and Dr. Mer managed to persuade me. I thought that somehow I would be able to return to Prague after the war.”

  Eva Landa, now Evelina Mer

  On April 23 they arrived in Sysran, where Eva spent several more weeks in the hospital. Because Dr. Mer’s military ambulance train had farther to go, he asked the head doctor at the hospital, Leonid Ostrower—who was both a doctor and a writer—to see to it that Eva would be left where she was if the patients should be transferred elsewhere. A few weeks later, the patients were indeed moved to a civilian hospital, but Eva was left behind alone, among strangers whose language she did not understand.

  By May 8 Eva’s feet had healed—they did not have to be amputated. For the first time in a long time, she went to the movies.

  Eva remained in Sysran until the end of August, when a telegram arrived from Dr. Mer, informing her that he himself could not come for her, but that he had arranged for her trip to Leningrad. And so Eva undertook another arduous journey, this time in the direction of Leningrad, where she finally arrived on August 31, 1945. “It was early in the morning on a rainy day,” she recalls. “There was no one there to meet me. My telegram had never arrived. But I did have an address— Dostoyevsky Street 36. And there I would spend the next eleven years of my life.”

  Cut off from her homeland and roots, Eva began her new life in distant Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) with an entirely new identity—as the daughter of Dr. Mer and his wife. She had no success in trying to learn about the fate of her immediate family, her relatives, or her friends. The letters she wrote to the Red Cross went unanswered.

  For Eva’s adoptive parents, any talk about her past was taboo. She was to act as if her childhood—the years before 1945—had never happened. The fact Eva was a Jew, a survivor of the concentration camps Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, was a stigma that had to be concealed in the anti-Semitic Soviet Union. Just to speak of it was dangerous, and Eva was warned never to do so. When she returned to school in 1947, she told no one of her past. Nor did she say a word about it when a relative of Dr. Mer talked about her own experiences in Bergen-Belsen. And how did Eva live with this?

  “That’s the sort of question to which I hav
e no answer. I don’t know. I wrote to my friends Marta and Anita, but I never received an answer. I had no idea where they were. I lost all contact. And so I simply accepted what had happened, and what was still happening, as facts. Maybe I even actively participated in this game. I was young. I was back in school. I wanted to make up for all that I had missed. I wanted to get a good education; I always wanted that. I learned a great deal, and was rewarded for my efforts. In 1950 I finished school with honors for the best essay—in Russian! I was proud of that. I had new friends. I never spoke about the past.”

  In 1953 Eva married a Russian-Jewish architect. She received her doctorate in German studies and became a university lecturer. In 1960 she finally succeeded in obtaining a visa for a trip to Czechoslovakia. The decisive factor for her had been a book she came across, The Death Factory: Documents on Auschwitz, by Ota Kraus and Erich Kulka. She wrote the authors a letter, which they arranged to have published in various Czech newspapers, and to which friends and one distant relative in Prague responded. She then received the invitation that enabled her to take a journey into her past. She traveled there alone in 1960, leaving her husband and four-year-old daughter at home.

  Once in Prague, Eva was confronted with the shocking news that she had long ago been declared dead, and that the assets of her parents and grandparents—including real estate of considerable value—had been inherited by a distant cousin of her father.

  In 1990 her son, Viktor Nimark, a painter and architect, moved to Germany. Her daughter remained in Russia with her family. Since then Eva, whose husband died in 1985, has been making three cities her home: St. Petersburg, Prague, and Frankfurt.

  Handa Pollak Drori

  HANDA POLLAK had been taken from Auschwitz to Oederan in Saxony, together with Tella and Helga Pollak, and she remained there as a worker in a munitions factory until mid-April 1945. The company, Agricola Refrigeration Machinery, Inc., was an extension of the Flossenbürg concentration camp. As the war’s front lines moved closer, the workers were supposed to be taken to another camp. But one camp after another was being liberated, and roads and railways were in a state of chaos. They were shunted from place to place in open cattle cars for weeks on end, until they finally wound up in Theresienstadt.