The Girls of Room 28

by Hannelore Brenner

  Last but not least, I would like to thank all the people who accompanied me on the long road I have traveled, and who always offered their kind support when I needed it, in particular Tilman Kannegiesser and, again, Frank Harders-Wuthenow, both of the musical agency Boosey & Hawkes in Berlin, as well as my dear friend Eva Wuthenow. And I cannot fail to mention still others who helped breathe life into this book: Nicolette Richter, who was the first to volunteer to proofread the manuscript long before there was the prospect of a publisher; Annette Anton, my enormously capable German literary agent; and Klaus Fricke and Jürgen Bolz, my editors at Droemer Verlag and Aufbau Verlag, which published a new German edition in 2008.

  This English-language translation was greatly enhanced by two people. My heartfelt thanks go to Ernest Seinfeld of Connecticut, a survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, who offered valuable suggestions. I am equally grateful to Gabriel Fawcett, a young British historian, translator, and historical tour guide who is based in Berlin. I only wish I had meet him earlier. Gabriel assisted me in proofreading the English translation and displayed an extraordinary feel for language and knowledge of history. The book has benefited from Gabriel’s advice on how the girls’ story fits into the larger context of the Holocaust and World War II.

  A very personal thank-you goes to my daughter, Hester, who is now seventeen years old. Since the age of four, she has lived with the melodies of Brundibár and with a mother who has always been busy doing research, making phone calls, traveling, and writing a book. It certainly hasn’t been easy for her. But whenever I found my spirits flagging, she came through miraculously, urging me on by saying, “Mom, you can do it.” How could I have disappointed her? Thank you, sweetheart.

  NOTES

  * Hannah Senesh was born in Budapest in 1921. A Zionist, she arrived in Palestine in September 1938. She joined the active resistance to the Nazis and participated in a parachute drop over Yugoslavia on March 13, 1944. The goal of her squadron was to liberate Allied pilots whose planes had been shot down over enemy territory. When Hannah crossed the border into Hungary she was captured by the Germans and sent to a prison in Budapest, where she was executed on November 4, 1944. In Israel, Hannah Senesh is regarded as a national heroine.

  ONE Spindlermühle, Czech Republic, Autumn 2000

  1. The Bielefeld production was the first postwar production of Brundibár on a major stage. The translation of the text by Frank Harders-Wuthenow and Michael Harre is now the authorized version, published by Boosey & Hawkes/Bote & Bock Music Publishers, and the basis for more recent productions of the opera. It is an unusual success story that owes a great deal to the Jeunesses Musicales Deutschland (JMD) and especially to the commitment of its former general secretary, Thomas Rietschel. In 1996 the JMD initiated the pedagogical Brundibár Project, which had an enormous impact throughout the world. It must also be noted, however, that even before there was a score or piano reduction or a text of Brundibár, Veronika Grüters, a nun and music teacher at the St. Ursula Gymnasium in Freiburg, worked with a group of students and went to great lengths to stage the opera in July 1985. In May 1986 this same ensemble toured Israel, giving four performances of Brundibár. Veronika Grüters had discovered the opera by way of the film of Brundibár— die Kinderoper von Theresienstadt [Brundibár—the Children’s Opera of Theresienstadt], Cineropa-Film (Munich, 1955), directed by Walter Krüttner.

  2. The feature is now available on a CD produced by Austrian Radio (ORF): Edition Abseits, EDA 015-2, together with a second CD of the opera Brundibár in coproduction with Southwest German Radio (SWR), in a 1997 production directed by Friedemann Keck.

  3. Fredy Hirsch’s speech on the one-year anniversary of the Boys’ Home L 417, mid-1943. Typescript, Jewish Museum in Prague, Terezín Collection, Inv. No. 304/1.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Livia Rothkirchen, “Der geistige Widerstand in Theresienstadt” [“Intellectual Resistance in Theresienstadt”], in Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 1997, ed. Miroslav Kárný, Raimund Kemper, and Margita Kárná (Prague: Edition Theresienstädter Initiative Academia, 1997), pp. 118–40.

  6. “Musik in Theresienstadt” [“Music in Theresienstadt”], in Theresienstadt, ed. Rudolf Iltis, František Ehrmann, and Ota Heitlinger, trans. Walter Hacker (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1968), pp. 260–63.

  TWO Saying Goodbye

  1. Kyjov is the Czech name of this town, Gaya the German name. These double names come from the period of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, during which many cities bore both a German and a Czech name. Each cultural community used the variant appropriate to it. During the period of German occupation, German names were in official use. After 1945, these place-names reverted to their Czech version. In this translation Czech names have been used throughout, except when official German documents are quoted or when German names, especially those of concentration camps, are the more common usage in the English-speaking world.

  2. “Sudetenland” was the term used by the German population for those parts of Bohemia and Moravian-Silesia that had been settled by Germans. It does not represent any historical, geographical, or cultural entity as such. The name is derived from the Sudeten Mountains, part of the Iser mountain range. The term “Sudeten Germans” first gained political currency with the increasing strength of the Sudetendeutsche Party, and then began to replace the competing term “German Bohemians.”

  3. Hans Safrian, Eichmann und seine Gehilfen [Eichmann and His Helpers] (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1995), p. 115.

  4. Deutsche Politik im “Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren” unter Reinhard Heydrich 1941–1942, ed. Miroslav Kárný, Jaroslava Milotová, and Margita Kárná (Berlin: Metropol, 1997), pp. 137ff.

  5. Ibid., p. 150.

  6. Jochen Von Lang, Das Eichmann-Protokoll. Tonbandaufzeichnungen der israelischen Verhöre (Munich: Ullstein, 2001), pp. 93–94.

  THREE Daily Life in the Camp

  1. Miroslav Kárný, “Jakob Edelsteins letzte Briefe” [“Jakob Edelstein’s Last Letters”], in Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 1997, pp. 216–29.

  2. Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937), philosopher, president of the Czech Republic, 1918–35.

  3. “Berichte zum ersten Jahrestag der Theresienstädter Heime in L 417” [“Reports on the First Anniversary of the Theresienstadt Homes in L 417”], in Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 1998, ed. Miroslav Kárný, Raimund Kemper, and Margita Kárná (Prague: Edition Theresienstädter Initiative Academia, 1998), p. 150.

  4. Ibid.

  5. From the testimony of Zeev Shek before the Commission for the Concentration Camp of Terezin, June 29, 1945, in Kurt Jiri Kotouc et al., We Are Children Just the Same: Vedem, the Secret Magazine by the Boys of Terezin, trans. R. Elizabeth Novak (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995).

  6. Ibid.

  7. Typescript of the “Report on the First Anniversary of the Theresienstadt Homes in L 417,” by Dr. Rudolf Klein, Jewish Museum in Prague, Terezin Collection, Inv. No. 304/1.

  8. “Theresienstädter Kindertagebücher, Helga Kinsky, Helga Weissová-Hošková, Charlotte Verešová,” in Iltis, Ehrmann, and Heitlinger, eds., Theresienstadt, pp. 114–24.

  9. Typescript of a submission to an essay contest held on the anniversary of the Girls’ Home L 410, October 18, 1943. The young author’s initials are R.G.; Memorial and Archive Beit Terezin, Givat Chaim Ichud, Israel.

  10. “Theresienstadter Kindertagebücher.” Taken from the diary of fourteen-year-old Šary Weinstein of Prague (she later went by the name Charlotte Verešová). She lived in another room of the Girls’ Home.

  11. In addition to this adaptation and staging of the Esther story, there was a more elaborate production for adults directed by Norbert Fried, with music by Karel Reiner.

  12. “Kurt Singer: Musikkritischer Brief Nr. 4, Verdi’s Requiem” [“Kurt Singer: A Music Critic’s Letter No. 4, Verdi’s Requiem”], in Ulrike Migdal, ed., Und die Musik spielt dazu. Chansons und Satiren aus dem KZ Theresienstadt (Munich: Piper, 1990), pp. 169ff.


  13. As we learn from Kurt Singer’s report, Tella (Ella Pollak) usually accompanied these productions. He writes: “Presumably Schächter would have speeded up the tempo of the Dies Irae if he had had an orchestra instead of a piano (placed in an inconvenient spot, but played excellently by Miss Pollak).”

  14. Rosa Engländerová, “Unsere Aufgabe, unser Weg” [“Our Task, Our Path”], in Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 1998, pp. 169-71.

  15. Egon (Gonda) Redlich, “Die dreifache Aufgabe der Jugendfürsorge” [“The Threefold Task of Youth Welfare”], in Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 1998, pp. 154–56.

  16. See Kotouc et al., We Are Children Just the Same.

  17. Typescript of a submission to an essay contest held on the anniversary of the Girls’ Home L 410, October 18, 1943. Memorial and Archive Beit Terezin, Givat Chaim Ichud, Israel.

  18. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960), p. 939.

  19. Willy Groag in a conversation with the author in Israel, 1999. Willy Groag died on October 10, 2001.

  20. Von Lang, Das Eichmann-Protokoll, pp. 221–22.

  21. Ruth Bondy, “Es gab einen Kameraden. Die Kinderzeitung Kamerád im Ghetto Theresienstadt” [“There Once Was a Comrade. The Children’s Periodical Kamerád in Theresienstadt Ghetto”], in Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 1997, pp. 248–61.

  22. Web site of the House of the Wannsee Conference, Memorial Center: www.ghwk.de/deut/ausstellung2006.htm.

  23. Gerhart M. Riegner, “Die Beziehung des Roten Kreuzes zu Theresienstadt in der Endphase des Krieges [“The Relationship Between the Red Cross and Theresienstadt in the Final Phase of the War”], in Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 1996, ed. Miroslav Kárný, Raimund Kemper, and Margita Kárná (Prague: Edition Theresienstädter Initiative Academia, 1996), pp. 19–30.

  24. As Bernd Biege reports in his book Helfer unter Hitler. Das Rote Kreuz im Dritten Reich [Helpers Under Hitler: The Red Cross and the Third Reich] (Reinbek: Kinder Verlag, 2000), Ernst Robert Grawitz, chief medical officer of the SS, confidant of Heinrich Himmler, and active as well as passive participant in criminal experiments conducted on human beings, was executive president of the German Red Cross from 1937 to 1945. He wrote the rules by which selections were made in concentration camps. Thus, it was Grawitz who ordered the immediate death of 70–80 percent of the Jews arriving at these camps—above all the ill, the frail, the aged, and small children.

  25. Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 1994, ed. Miroslav Kárný, Raimund Kemper, and Margita Kárná (Prague: Edition Theresienstädter Initiative Academia, 1994), document section, unpaginated.

  26. The Patria never arrived at its destination. Since the British had refused entry into the harbor, the ship exploded just off the Israeli coast. There were many casualties. Flaška’s sister survived and swam ashore, but the events surrounding her arrival remained a lifelong trauma.

  27. Sokol (Czech for “falcon”) was a Czech athletic club founded in 1862 as part of the Czech nationalist movement. After the occupation, it was closed to Jews, and in 1941 the entire organization was declared illegal and dissolved.

  FOUR Island in a Raging Sea

  1. Rudolf Franěk, “Brundibár, der Brummbär” [“Brundibár, the Grumbler”], in Iltis, Ehrmann, and Heitlinger, eds., Theresienstadt, pp. 272–78. After the war, Rudolf Freudenfeld changed his name to Rudolf Franěk.

  2. Honza Holub played the ice-cream vendor. Unfortunately, the casting information is incomplete.

  3. Kotouc et al., We Are Children Just the Same, pp. 154–55.

  4. According to Vojtěch Blodig, historian for the Theresienstadt Memorial, within thirty-six hours 6,422 people from the Sudeten Barracks and the Bodenbach Barracks were resettled. The vacated rooms were used as a depository for the secret files of the Reich Security Main Office. This institution was given the name Berlin Branch Office and was separate from the rest of the camp.

  5. Manfred Grieger, “Anton Burger—ein österreichischer Dienstmann” [“Anton Burger—an Austrian Henchman”], in Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 1995, ed. Miroslav Kárný, Raimund Kemper, and Margita Kárná (Prague: Edition Theresienstädter Initiative Academia, 1995), pp. 241–48.

  6. Karel Berman, “Erinnerungen von Karel Berman” [“Recollections of Karel Berman”], in Iltis, Ehrmann, and Heitlinger, eds., Theresienstadt, pp. 254–58.

  7. “Theresienstädter Kindertagebücher,” pp. 114–24.

  8. On the night of August 15, 1943, the SS began liquidating the ghetto of Bialystok, a city in northeast Poland with a high percentage of Jewish inhabitants. (In 1913, 48,000 of the 61,500 residents were Jewish.) From the start of the German occupation on June 27, 1941, to August 1943, approximately 20,000 Jews had already been shot dead or deported and murdered in the death camps. The remaining 30,000 Jews in the Bialystok ghetto were murdered on the spot between August 16 and August 20, 1943, in the course of a futile attempt at resistance, or brought to Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, or labor camps at Ponoatowa and Blizyn, where they met their deaths. Twelve hundred children, accompanied by 25 adults, were brought to Theresienstadt on a train. The adults were immediately sent on to Auschwitz. On October 5, 1943, the children, plus 35 escorts, left Theresienstadt on Transport Dn/a for the same destination. Immediately upon arrival, both the children and their escorts were murdered in the gas chambers.

  9. Ruth Bondy, “Chronik der sich schliessenden Tore” [“Chronicle of the Closing Gates”], which quotes the Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt [Jewish Newspaper] of March 22, 1940, in Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 2000, ed. Miroslav Kárný, Raimund Kemper, and Margita Kárná (Prague: Edition Theresienstädter Initiative Academia, 2000), pp. 86–106.

  FIVE Light in the Darkness: Brundibár

  1. Adolf Hoffmeister in the film Brundibár—die Kinderoper von Theresienstadt (Munich, 1966). Produced by Cineropa Film; directed by Walter Krüttner.

  2. “Berichte zum ersten Jahrestag der Theresienstädter Heime in L 417”: Hans Krása, “Brundibár,” in Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 1998, pp. 178–80.

  3. Franěk, “Brundibár, der Brummbär,” pp. 254–58.

  4. Typescript of a lecture by Professor Israel Kestenberg, 1943. Original in the Jewish Museum in Prague, Terezin Collection, Inv. No. 304/1.

  5. “Berichte zum ersten Jahrestag der Theresienstädter Heime in L 417”: Friederike Brandeis, “Kinderzeichnen” [“Children’s Drawings”], in Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 1998, pp. 175–78. Unless otherwise noted, the quotations that follow are also taken from this source.

  6. Elena Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Ein Leben für Kunst und Lehre (Vienna and Munich: Christian Brandstätter Verlag, 2000), p. 21.

  7. Edith Kramer in a conversation with the author in Berlin on July 19, 2001. Edith Kramer, who emigrated to New York in 1938 and made a name for herself there as an art teacher and painter, has been especially active in keeping the artistic legacy of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis alive. In her first book, Art Therapy in a Children’s Community (1958), she formulated the theoretical basis for her work, making her, along with Elinor Ulman and Margareth Naumburg, an American pioneer in this pedagogical discipline. The fact that Edith Kramer dedicated her second book, Art Therapy for Children, to Friedl Dicker-Brandeis suggests what a strong influence her teacher had on her own development.

  8. Georg Schrom in a lecture given as part of the symposium “Art, Music and Education as Strategies for Survival,” Moravian College, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, February 10, 2000.

  9. Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, p. 130.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Ibid., p. 131.

  12. In his daily order of July 7, 1943, camp commandant Burger threatened the harshest punishment for unreported pregnancies. For a while all pregnancies were terminated with abortions. Later the commandant reserved for himself the decision as to whether a pregnancy was to be aborted or carried to full term. Most pregnant women, howe
ver, could expect to be put on the next transport to the East. A total of about 350 involuntary abortions were carried out. Of 207 children born in the camp, 25 survived.

  13. On January 10, 1942, nine ghetto prisoners were hanged for infractions against camp rules; seven more hangings followed on February 26, 1942. Most of them had smuggled or tried to smuggle illegal letters or news out of the camp. One had secretly met with his non-Jewish wife, who had come to see him at the camp. After February 1942, there were no more executions in the ghetto, although individuals were taken to the Little Fortress and murdered there.

  14. Alice Herz-Sommer in an interview with the author, summer 1999. Additional quotations are also based on this interview.

  15. Elsa Bernstein, Das Leben als Drama: Erinnerungen an Theresienstadt (Dortmund: Edition Ebersbach, 1999), p. 114.

  SIX Appearance and Reality

  1. Otto Pollak, diary entry. Presumably, “Monte Terezino” is the bastion on the ramparts. On July 11, 1943, Otto Pollak noted: “The first time on the bastion with Ornstein and Rühlmann from Berlin. Beautiful view of Litoměřice.”

  2. Miroslav Kárný, in “Jakob Edelsteins letzte Briefe,” in Theresienstädter Stu- dien und Dokumente 1997, pp. 216–29. Jakob Edelstein and his family were shot dead in Auschwitz-Birkenau on June 20, 1944.

  3. Kotouc et al., We Are Children Just the Same, p. 127.

  4. Viktor Ullmann, “Kritik Nr. 8, Musikalische Rundschau,” in 26 Kritiken über musikalische Veranstaltungen in Theresienstadt, ed. Ingo Schultz (Hamburg: Bockel Verlag, 1996), pp. 51–55.

  5. Von Lang, Das Eichmann-Protokoll, p. 225.

  6. There was, in fact, a concentration camp for political prisoners at Heydebreck, Upper Silesia. But Eva is correct. The reality was that “to go to Heydebreck” meant “to go to the gas chambers.” As part of the deception of prisoners, the camp high command told them that the mass murders they were planning were merely a transport to the labor camp at Heydebreck.