The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope, and Survival in Theresienstadt

by Hannelore Brenner-Wonschick; Hannelore Brenner

  Two girls who seemed to be the youngest slept on the lowest bunk beside the window: Maria Mühlstein and a girl who was obviously the pet of Room 28. Her name was Ruth Schächter, but everyone called her by her nickname, Zajíček, which means “bunny” in Czech. Helga was surprised to find out that nearly all the girls had nicknames. Eva Fischl answered to Fiška (“Fish”), Ruth Popper to Poppinka, and Anna Flach to Flaška (“Little Bottle”). There was a Didi, Alice Sittig; an Olile, Olga Löwy; and a Rutka, Ruth Gutmann. Many of the nicknames, like Zajíček’s, were taken from the animal realm. There was a girl called Kuře (“Chick”) and one called Prasátko (“Piglet”). Next to Marianne Deutsch, who was usually called Marianka, lay little Hana Epstein, who went by Holubička (“Dove”).

  Sometimes the girls teased little Hana. “Come here, Holubička, play our little dove,” they would call. Then they all would sing the Czech folk song “Vyletěla Holubička ze scaly” (“A Little Dove Flew out of the Rock”). And, merry as a little bird, Hana would jump about the room to the applause and shouts of her roommates.

  Helga watched it all as if through a telescope. Everything around her seemed unreal. It was not her world. She didn’t belong here. It seemed to her that there was no place for her. She crept into her shell. “The girls don’t like me—I know it,” she wrote in her diary on February 14. “But that doesn’t bother me here in Theresienstadt. I don’t care about them. But I care about Frau Sander. I’m as fond of her as if she were my aunt.”

  Mimi Sander was her father’s girlfriend from Vienna. It had come as a great surprise to Helga to be introduced to Mimi shortly after her arrival in the attic of the Hamburg Barracks. She had heard a great deal about this woman from her father, but she had never met her. And here she was, standing right in front of Helga. “To think this is where we’ve met. I can’t believe it,” Helga wrote in her diary. “She looks just the way I pictured her.”

  Helga’s father and Mimi Sander, her relatives from Kyjov—especially Lea, the one-year-old daughter of her cousin Trude—these were the people to whom Helga felt attached and with whom she spent as much time as possible. In Room 28, she still felt like a stranger.

  Wednesday, March 3, 1943

  It’s been so long since I’ve written anything, and so much has happened in the meantime! I was in bed for a week. I had a bad cold and couldn’t write because I had conjunctivitis. Now I can write again without my eyes hurting so much. Lea has pneumonia. I saw her yesterday. She looks like a little wax doll.

  Friday, March 5, 1943

  I’ve been given two inoculations for typhoid, which is why I’m lying in bed. Papa hasn’t been to see me yet either. Evening: Mimi was just here. She brought me goulash with potatoes. Papa won’t be coming today, he’s too tired.

  Sunday, March 7, 1943

  Nothing special happened the whole day. Lea is still just as sick. It’s Masaryk’s birthday today.2 My favorite counselor told us all about him.

  Monday, March 8, 1943

  We got up at 6:30 this morning because we had to do a thorough housecleaning. I’m not tired at all, though I worked hard enough. We tossed our pillows and mattresses out of the third-story windows down into the garden, where we beat them. And afterward I cleaned thirty pairs of house shoes and fifty pairs of regular shoes. All by myself! Lea is doing worse. Yesterday evening she got her second blood transfusion. I found some dextrose for her. What a circus we’ve just had here. Some kids hid one girl’s pillow, and she’s been crying for a whole hour now.

  Before I went to bed, I happened look out the window. I’ll never forget my impressions at that moment for as long as I live. A mountain with a village on its slopes. Above the mountain, a red sky, all the shades of the setting sun. The sky was still very blue, and in about the middle was a crescent moon, and beside it a star, and off to one side in the shadows towered Castle Hasenburg. I closed the shutters quickly. I couldn’t bear the sight any longer, I felt uneasy. I’m locked up in here—with such magnificent nature so near! Freedom! How happy I’d be if I could live deep in the woods, in a cabin or in a tent, all alone, and could experience freedom.

  As of February 1943, the Girls’ Home L 410 had been in existence for a little less than six months. Occupying a former military administration building that was right next to the church on Market Square, it had provided, since its opening on September 1, 1942, lodging for about 360 girls who were allocated rooms—subunits called “Homes”—according to their year of birth.

  The Girls’ Home was directed by Rosa Engländer, Walter Freund, and Karel Huttner. Several counselors were assigned to each room, but one bore the overall responsibility. In Room 28 that person was Ella Pollak. At her side were Eva Weiss, a few years younger than she, and others who would help out as needed.

  On the other side of Market Square, in what had been the Theresienstadt school, was the Boys’ Home L 417. It had been founded before the Girls’ Home, on July 8, 1942. Other homes had also been established on the same pattern: the Toddlers’ Home L 318, several homes for apprentices, as well as Home L 414, which lodged children primarily from Germany and Austria. Homes L 410 and L 417 were reserved mainly for the children of the Protectorate.

  Of the approximately five thousand children and teenagers up to the age of sixteen who were then living in Theresienstadt, only a fraction lived in these homes. Babies and toddlers spent the nights with one of their parents, usually the mother, and were cared for during the day—depending on their age—in toddlers’ homes or nurseries. A sizable number of children between the ages of eight and sixteen stayed with the adults in the large general barracks. There wasn’t enough room for all of them in the Children’s Homes, where the living conditions were a bit better.

  “We were aware that material conditions are of crucial importance for a young person who is still in the developmental stage,” Otto Zucker, a member of the Council of Elders and deputy to Edelstein, wrote in mid-1943 in his report on the occasion of the first anniversary of the Boys’ Home L 417. “Those conditions must be as favorable as possible if we are to have a strong and healthy generation that is physically up to the tasks that the future holds for the Jewish people.”3

  Lodging these young people in what the Germans called youth homes improved their overall situation and allowed for the implementation of specific pedagogical objectives. Otto Zucker summed up the program this way: “An education of the young individual for communal life: We are convinced that this education to foster a collective orientation, to help young people find their way in the community, subordinating individual interests to the interests of the community and letting each individual develop within the framework of the community’s organization is an essential part of today’s educational tasks.”4

  The entire staff of the Youth Welfare Office and, above all, Jakob Edelstein and the Council of Elders were of one mind regarding their obligation to and special responsibility for the welfare of the young ghetto prisoners. During the earliest days of the ghetto, a fundamental decision had been made—that the welfare of the young had priority over that of the old. For the young people this meant better food, better and more hygienic living conditions, and special medical care. But for the older people, of course, this meant greater privation and hunger— “bread was literally being taken from their mouths.”5

  “This may have been somewhat unusual and cruel toward the elderly,” said Ze’ev Shek, the Zionist youth leader and a founding member of the Hechalutz movement, in his testimony before an Allied investigative commission on June 29, 1946, “but given the circumstances then it was an entirely correct solution, favoring the future. … The Council of Elders’ decision was applied in all the lodgings, in the kitchens and in the streets. Everywhere, special care was given to the children.”6

  On March 9 Helga attended a puppet theater for the first time in Theresienstadt. “It was very beautiful for Theresienstadt,” she recalls, “and it had definitely required a lot of work and effort to make all the puppets. The piece was c
alled The Enchanted Violin. Someone played a violin and someone played a harmonium (though not very well).”

  That brief bit of enjoyment was quickly forgotten. “The pneumonia is spreading,” Helga wrote in her diary that same evening, after a visit to her cousin Lea. “The doctor thinks that if her heart has held out this long, it will keep holding on. But Dr. Fischer is doubtful that Lea will survive.”

  Lea was thirteen months old when she arrived in Theresienstadt, and she became sick within a day. Hers was not an isolated case; the ghetto was a breeding ground for infections. And then there was also the psychological shock. Even today just a catchphrase can bring back all the scenes that Judith Schwarzbart associates with her first days in the ghetto: “The Hamburg Barracks was dreadfully overcrowded, and everything was in great confusion. The older people wanted peace and quiet, the children wanted to play, there was constant shouting, arguing, and noise. Everyone was cold, and everyone was hungry. There were lice, and my beautiful long hair was cut off. I fought awfully hard to stop them from doing it—to no avail. They cut it off.”

  Eva Stern and her father, Dr. Walter Stern. Eva was born in the northern Bohemian town of Žatec. When she was six months old, her family moved to Brno, where her father started a pediatrics practice.

  A short time later, Judith developed a high fever accompanied by persistent vomiting. The doctors didn’t know what to do. There was no change in her condition for days. Then Dr. Walter Stern came up with the right diagnosis: jaundice. “It was Theresienstadt’s first case of jaundice. It was followed by a dreadful jaundice epidemic. I came down with it three times. My sister did, too. She almost died of it.”

  Judith recovered but kept getting sick again. “I lay in the quarantine infirmary with jaundice and scarlet fever for six weeks. I survived. When I came down with typhoid, my father took me in—he lived in the shed of the garden he tended. I didn’t want to eat or drink anything. I just begged for a piece of lemon—oh, how I wanted a lemon! And my father brought me half a lemon. Where he managed to find it I don’t know. But he was great at finagling.”

  A talent for “organizing” things, as everyone in Theresienstadt quickly learned, was essential in the daily struggle for survival. But that alone was often not sufficient for dealing with all the dangers and securing that which was essential for survival. The doctors in particular, facing all but insurmountable difficulties, were painfully aware of this. There was neither enough medical equipment nor enough of the essential medicines to help fight the rampant disease. This is clearly evident from a report written in July 1943 by Dr. Rudolf Klein, who was responsible for medical care in the Boys’ Home L 417:

  From July 1942 until the end of 1942 … the homes experienced a substantial epidemic of scarlet fever. … In August and on into early autumn there were epidemics of various forms of diarrhea, followed by numerous cases of infectious jaundice, whereas German measles, mumps, measles, chicken pox, whooping cough were of less concern to us and our patients, except for complications that came with cases of German measles, all of which took a bad turn, but fortunately the patients were restored to health. [There were] several cases of pneumonia and middle ear infections that required surgery.

  One great concern was the serious flare-up of typhoid toward the end of January 1943. Around fifty children fell ill in the course of two months, some of them with very severe cases.

  As regards the numbers of illnesses recorded per day, there were periods in which thirty to thirty-five percent of the children lay ill— with several different illnesses. A difficult burden for us to bear, since several of those on our already small medical staff were ill at the same time.7

  Drawing by Helga Weiss of the Girls’ Home, Room 24. In February 1943 she noted in her diary: “Typhoid is rampant everywhere in Theresienstadt. The hospitals are overflowing. They cleared one whole building and turned it into a hospital for typhoid cases. You see signs everywhere: ‘Beware: Typhoid!’ There’s a sign at every water tap and well: ‘Don’t forget to wash your hands!’—But there’s hardly ever any running water. On the door of L 410 there is a big sign: ‘Beware: Danger of Infections.’ Everyone flees on the spot.”

  Dr. Klein was able to report that “fortunately” all the boys who had fallen ill with typhoid recovered, but the numbers for Girls’ Home L 410 were very different. There, typhoid revealed its most devastating side.

  “Lilka’s sister has died,” Helga Weiss, a resident of Room 24, wrote in her diary during this period. “Lilka herself has typhoid, too. Vera, Olina, and Marta are in the infirmary. Milča was taken to Hohenelbe Barracks yesterday. They say she’s dying. ‘What’s wrong, Hanka? Why are you crying so bitterly? What! Dáša?’—‘Dáša and Jana … they’re both dead!’ ”8

  Dáša Bloch and Jana Gintz were inseparable friends. “They often said that nothing but death could separate them,” a girl from Home 16 remarked when describing her indelible impressions of the Girls’ Home in October 1943:

  Life in the Home went on peacefully and everything was as usual. Until the typhoid epidemic broke out. The first cases were Dáša and Jana. They were taken to the hospital on February 1, 1943. But they weren’t kept together. Jana was taken to the Hohenelbe Barracks, Dáša to the typhoid infirmary at L 317. On the morning of February 5, we learned that they had both died the day before, both around six in the evening. Their wish came true, unfortunately far sooner than either wanted. When we were told of their death, none of us could say a word or even cry at first. We knew that they were very sick, but it never would have crossed our minds that they would not be coming back to us. After a while we lit a candle at the head of their bunks. We stood stock-still, and I think all of us prayed.9

  Helga Pollak’s diary continues:

  Wednesday, March 10, 1943

  I was on call all day and I am very tired. … Lea is doing a little better. She drank three ounces of milk with dextrose. I hope she survives.

  Thursday, March 11, 1943

  We had almost the whole afternoon off. I went to see Frau Sander and then I visited Lea. She’s doing better. She slept the whole night through, drank a lot of buttermilk, and when we showed her a picture book, she laughed for the first time in months. Then I went to see Papa, and we talked about what presents I could give for Purim, because we girls in the Home want to make presents.

  Ah, I almost forgot: I want to write down what we get to eat. Every day the soup is lentil soup. Bad potatoes and gravy that’s almost always burned. Almost every evening there’s margarine and black ersatz coffee. About twice a week there’s some kind of noodles for lunch. Every third day we get a little piece of bread, which has to last for three days. When we first arrived, it seemed a lot to me. I gave almost my entire bread ration to Papa. But now it’s not enough for me.

  Friday, March 12, 1943

  I’m awfully tired, and glad that tomorrow is Saturday and that I’ll have half a day off. I’m sewing presents for Purim, out of paper!— What silliness.

  In the afternoon I got together with Trude, who was taking Lea for a walk. Lea is not even half of her former weight. She’s doing a little better. May God make her healthy again!

  Yesterday I was invited to an eight o’clock theater performance in the Home of the children born in 1931. It was on the second floor here in our house. I don’t know what the fairy tale is called. It has five parts, and they put on just the first part. The sequel is to follow soon. It was very pretty. It’s about a king and a forest giant. The girls danced Czech folk dances.—I remembered how my mother took me to the ballet school in Vienna when I was five years old. I also remembered having danced the czardas in a Hungarian folk costume before my parents and relatives. How beautiful it was back then! Together with Mama and Papa! I lived like a princess. Now Mama is so far away from me. But I’m glad that at least things are better for her, and she doesn’t have to live through what we’re living through here.

  Two months after her arrival, Helga had become a well-functioning cog in the mechanism of
Room 28. “I was on cleanup duty yesterday with a group of very lazy girls, so that I had to do almost everything myself,” Helga jotted down on March 18. “We did a poor job of sweeping up at noon, and so our punishment was to do everything all over again. But now I’m lying in bed and have all that behind me, and I’m looking forward to an afternoon off tomorrow.”

  The days weren’t always that filled with work. But even without cleanup duty, daily life was hard enough, especially early in the morning. The wake-up call sounded every day, usually at seven: “Get up, girls!” And that meant going downstairs to the big, cold, ugly washroom on the ground floor and standing in line to use the primitive toilets— there were only two to three toilets per floor, which meant two toilets for about 120 girls. Then came a thorough hand washing with a squirt of Lysol in a special basin, watched over by Frau Salus, who was in charge of the toilets and constantly repeated the little rhyme: “Wash your hands before you eat / And when you get off the toilet seat.”

  Every morning the beds had to be aired according to strict rules and in daily rotation—some at the window, others on the bunks themselves or on the table. Then chores were assigned, according to the “Torahnoot Plan” (torahnoot is Hebrew for “service”) that was posted on the door. It listed who was responsible for what chore on what day. Generally that meant fetching the midday meal, cleaning duty, and what was known as “being on call.”