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

by Hannelore Brenner-Wonschick; Hannelore Brenner

  For many girls, early morning was the least pleasant part of the day, especially when it was cold and gray outside. Who wouldn’t rather go on sleeping and dreaming—especially dreams that blotted out the present and brought relief and strength to the mind? Only the children who were clearly ill were allowed to stay in bed until one of the pediatricians, Dr. Stern or Dr. Fischer, arrived and decided what was to be done. Those with minor symptoms might sometimes be allowed to spend the day in bed, while those who were more seriously ill were placed in a room in the Girls’ Home that had been specifically set up as an infirmary, or marodka, as it was called in Czech. That actually wasn’t the worst thing that could happen. At least in the smaller groupings one could find some peace and quiet, which was close to impossible in the large rooms.

  And what added to the appeal of being diagnosed with a minor illness was the much better chance of enjoying a few extra “bonuses.” These were doled out by Margit Mühlstein, the social worker assigned to L 410. Even if they amounted to nothing more than two or three spoonfuls of oatmeal or wheat grits, they at least offered some respite from the monotonous daily fare that came from the children’s kitchen:

  MONDAY: soup, millet; evening: a little piece of bread

  TUESDAY: soup, potatoes, turnips; evening: soup

  WEDNESDAY: soup, potatoes, Goulash, a small piece of bread; Evening: a small piece of bread

  THURSDAY: soup, dumpling, gravy; evening: sausage, soup

  FRIDAY: soup, pearl barley; evening: buns

  SATURDAY: soup, potatoes, turnips; evening: soup

  SUNDAY: soup, buns with icing; evening: twenty grams of margarine, a teaspoonful of marmalade

  This children’s menu comes from the diary of fourteen-year-old Šary Weinstein, who added the following commentary: “The list of foods doesn’t look all that bad. But the food is horribly prepared, and the soups are the same every day. They look like water from a mop pail, ugh. I’ve never eaten soup in my life, and I’m certainly not going to eat the soup here. We have black coffee for breakfast (it’s dishwater) and nothing with it.”10

  The packages that Helga and her father received at regular intervals from a relative in Kyjov became increasingly important events in Helga’s life. On March 16 they got a package with bread, sausage, cheese, and gingerbread. The next one arrived on April 1: “I got another package today, a real nice one. It made me so happy. If it weren’t for Maria’s packages I’d often go hungry. This package contained a cauliflower, three apples, three wedges of cheese, four bouillon cubes, salami, potato flour, and an eighth of a pound of butter. Here I am writing about food again! But it made me so happy.” The fact that she had to share her little packages with eight other people—her father and other relatives—did not diminish her happiness.

  Many children—Flaška, Zajíček, Judith, among others—could only dream of such packages. They had no one to send them anything, and they had no choice but to get by on the standard rations from the kitchen. They quickly learned that the piece of bread doled out every third day needed to be handled with utmost care. Each time they received it they wondered: Should I eat it all in one sitting because I’m so hungry? Or should I make it last for three days? Or for two days, and go hungry on the third?

  By then it no longer made any difference that the bread was painfully lacking the familiar smell and taste of fresh bread, or that it was being delivered on old wagons that were similar to the ones used to transport corpses. Anyone who had been in Theresienstadt for even a few days appreciated bread more than ever. It even functioned as the ghetto’s unofficial currency. You could exchange a piece of bread for all sorts of things—a tomato, a cigarette, a few sticks of wood, a garment, a piece of paper. Or even an hour of private instruction.

  The old and infirm were in no position to make such deals. They owned nothing and were so hungry that they didn’t know how to help themselves. Helga witnessed their dilemma firsthand. When she visited her uncle Eugen in the Sudeten Barracks on March 16, she saw potato peels being tossed out of the kitchen, “and ten people threw themselves onto that little pile, fighting for it. To Papa and me it looked like what happens when you throw three bones to eight dogs, and the dogs bite each other to get at the bones.”

  A bread wagon. Such wagons also served as hearses. Drawing by Helga Weiss

  Saturday, March 13, 1943

  Today, as on every Saturday, we stayed in bed until eight o’clock. I woke up early and it was such a wonderful feeling. All the girls were asleep, the window was open, and the birds were chirping, just like the ones I had so loved listening to at home.

  Monday, March 15, 1943

  Sirens started howling in the middle of the night, waking me up. I couldn’t remember quickly enough what it was, and thought that the sirens were telling us we could return home. What a strange sound the sirens had. To my ears it was like the howling of jackals or wolves. I’ve learned since that the howl of sirens means there are enemy planes approaching.

  Tuesday, March 16, 1943

  We worked until 11:30, giving our room a thorough cleaning. I got out of other duties for the afternoon, and for the first time in my life I did laundry. This Theresienstadt is a school for life.

  Yesterday there was a real ruckus. Helena grabbed a crust of bread from another girl, who then took revenge by hiding Helena’s pajama tops, which then set her howling. The counselor didn’t know what to do and called in the director of the Girls’ Home, Frau Engländer. She calmed Helena down, and everything was back to normal. But I could not help laughing, even with Frau Engländer there.

  Wednesday, March 17, 1943

  I was on duty the whole day, which didn’t exactly please me. I didn’t even get to visit Papa at noon. I played dodgeball until three o’clock, and afterward went to a children’s recital. Six-and seven-year-old girls danced and did gymnastics, but some were my age, too. Some of the big girls made a mess of it, but the little ones were all agile and charming. I was especially taken by a girl my age who tap-danced.

  The biggest event of the day was that I went half into hysterics. I was rearranging my suitcase, picked up a wad of cotton, and a mouse fell out! I stood there petrified, looking down at my suitcase. After a while I pulled myself together and called the counselor, then ran away. Laura, the counselor, caught the mouse and threw it out the window down into the garden, where the girls dug a little grave for it.

  Friday, March 19, 1943

  I’ve put together a plan for what I’ll be doing tomorrow. At one o’clock I’ll visit Mimi Sander, whom I haven’t seen for three days now. I’m going to get some of my clothes back from her, because she has no room for them, and put them in my suitcase, and then go to Papa. I’m looking forward to Purim. We’re going to have a žranice—a blowout banquet.

  Thirty-year-old Ella Pollak was the girls’ main counselor. They called her Tella, which was a combination of teta, which is Czech for “aunt,” and Ella. Tella and Eva Weiss, who was ten years her junior, spent most of the day with the girls. One of the counselors—usually Lilly Gross or Laura Šimko—always spent the night with them.

  Ella Pollak, born on June 13, 1913, in Liberec/Reichenberg, was an imposing figure. She was a piano teacher, had studied music at the Prague Conservatory, and in the mid-1930s had joined the Zionist youth movement Hechalutz. Her parents and two of her brothers, who had been able to emigrate to Palestine in time, had tried in vain to get her to do the same. But Tella saw it as her duty to remain in her country and stand by the children. Until her deportation to Theresienstadt she worked as a madrichah (Hebrew for “counselor”) in the illegal system of education put together by Zionist organizations in Prague.

  When she arrived at Theresienstadt with one of the first transports at the end of 1941, Tella continued her work. Along with Eva Weiss, who came from Brno, she spent the first half of 1942 caring for a group of girls quartered in Room 104 of the Hamburg Barracks. The girls—Eva Winkler, Pavla Seiner, Eva Landa, and Ela Stein—were later transferred to Room
28. Also in the group was twelve-year-old Handa Pollak, in whose life Tella was soon to play an important role because of Handa’s father, Karel Pollak.

  Karel and Tella first met in Room 104 of the Hamburg Barracks. (The surname that they shared was a common one.) Karel was drawn to Tella—a good-looking woman with green eyes, thin lips, and black upswept hair—and the attraction was mutual. When Room 28 in the Girls’ Home was created and both Tella and Handa moved there, Karel Pollak had a twofold reason to stop by, which he did whenever possible after a day of work in the fields.

  Karel Pollak and Telia Pollak

  The girls called Karel Pollak “Strejda,” which is Czech for “uncle.” “He was always there for us,” the girls recall. “He was always ready to help and comfort us. Or explain something to us. He always had a kind word.”

  “He was perhaps the only man liked by everyone who knew him,” Handa says of her father. “He had studied in Halle in Germany and graduated with a degree in agriculture. He knew everything there was to know about nature and farming. He was the only teacher I ever had who was able to introduce me to the mysteries of mathematics. He had a great sense of humor, and he loved silly jokes that would make him laugh so hard that tears would come to his eyes. He loved to sing, even if not quite on key, and was very clever with his hands. That was his main job in Room 28, rebuilding our bunks for us. The day they did their count of us out in the Buhošovice Hollow in November 1943, he was the first to get back home and heat the stove for us so that we could get warm again.”

  Handa Pollak was a quiet girl with beautiful dark eyes. She loved her father very much, and she missed her mother. Her parents had divorced when she was four years old, and Handa had grown up in Olbramovice, a little village south of Prague, with her father. But in recent months Handa had been living with her mother, until, one day in 1941, she was torn away from her.

  Handa and her father had to leave their home in 1939 and had been living, mostly apart from each other, with a series of relatives in Prague. In the meantime, Handa’s mother, together with her sister and her sister’s husband, had built a house in Prague-Dějvice. When they moved into it in 1940, they took Handa with them. But larger political events soon caught up with them. “The Germans wanted our villa and insisted that my mother and her brother-in-law sign a document stating that they had ‘voluntarily’ handed the villa over to the Third Reich,” Handa recalls. “We heard that the Germans wanted the villa for Karl Rahm, whom we were soon to get to know as the commandant of Theresienstadt. But my mother and Uncle Jaroušek wouldn’t consent, which was why over the next several months they were both constantly summoned to appear before the Gestapo. They were threatened: ‘If you sign, you’ll be protected. If not, something bad may happen to you.’ They didn’t sign.”

  There were other, similar cases, for which the Germans devised the simplest solution—they put the people whose real estate or property they wanted in the next transport. Handa’s mother and her brother-in-law Jaroušek (his wife had died some weeks earlier of blood poisoning) were placed on the list of one of these “capitalist transports,” as they were called. “I can remember the day I said goodbye to my mother. We were both very unhappy. No one knew what lay ahead. I had a premonition that some dark, awful place awaited her. But none of us thought that things would be as awful as they later turned out to be.”

  Left behind without mother and father was four-year-old Jarmilka, the daughter of Handa’s relatives. She was taken in by another family, but they were unable to protect her. Jarmilka found herself in the very next transport. “It was horrible. She was all alone. We brought her to the assembly point. We asked another family to look after her. She cried terribly. The transport was headed for Lodz. We never heard from her again.”

  And Handa would never hear from her mother again, either—not one letter, not one message. It was only after the war that she learned of her mother’s fate. She had worked as a laboratory assistant in the Lodz Ghetto, which saved her from being transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. But when she saw that all her friends and comrades were being deported while she, as a “protected” person, was left behind, she decided— having always been a woman of principle—to give up her work. And with the very next transport she, too, was taken to Auschwitz.

  In 1943 the Jewish holiday Purim fell on March 21, the first day of spring. “I woke up at six o’clock,” Helga noted. “It was so quiet all around. The sun was shining, and the birds were singing.”

  Purim is one of the happiest of the Jewish holidays. It commemorates Queen Esther’s rescue of the Jewish community in Persia some twenty-five hundred years ago from the murderous plans of prime minister Haman. The adults had spent the previous days preparing the children for the holiday. Both Tella and Margit Mühlstein told them the story of Purim and explained its significance in Jewish culture. Margit, who was Maria’s mother, was very religious. To this day, in the minds of the girls of Room 28, the Jewish Sabbath and the holidays—Purim, Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, and Hanukkah—are linked to the image of this woman.

  “We never observed the Sabbath at home,” Ela Stein says. “It was Frau Mühlstein who first taught me how to light candles on Friday evening and how to pray. And she did it in such a special way—very solemn.”

  “Whenever she sang, the room would grow very quiet,” Flaška recalls. “She had a voice like honey.”

  Frau Mühlstein helped infuse the Girls’ Home with a little of the spiritual radiance that Purim brings with it. But it was equally important to do justice to the lighter side of the holiday—to eat, drink, and celebrate the happy ending of the story. Eva Weiss was perfect for this task.

  Everyone liked Eva, an athletic young woman who was so unaffected and open with the girls. She was not yet twenty years old and had thick, curly hair and muscular legs that were usually clad in shorts. She radiated energy. Tella was a person who lived by the rules, and some of the girls were afraid of her at times. But Eva was like an older sister, someone you immediately felt you could confide in.

  A few of the girls knew Eva from Brno. She belonged to a circle of young Zionists who had met regularly on Friday evenings in a room at the Jewish community center, among them Fredy Hirsch, Franta Maier, and Felix Strassmann. Until her deportation in April 1942, Eva had spent many hours with children and teenagers at the Maccabi Athletic Field in Pisárky, a suburb of Brno, leading them in gymnastics and dancing, playing dodgeball and other games. She continued to do this in Theresienstadt, in the Children’s Homes or on the Bastei, a special area on the south ramparts of the ghetto that was set aside for young people. “I used my entire arsenal to distract the children from their problems,” Eva Weiss says, describing her activities. “I used athletics and games, dancing and singing, whatever was possible.”

  On Purim the year before, some of the boys in the Boys’ Home L 318 put on a play based on the Purim story, called Esther. It had been arranged by Flaška’s brother, Michael Flach, who was one of the counselors there.11 This year it was the girls’ turn to perform the play, and Eva Weiss supervised the rehearsals. Fiška assumed the role of Esther, Flaška was cast as Esther’s cousin Mordecai, Eva Stern was the evil Haman, and beautiful Eva Landa, wrapped in a bathrobe and with a crown atop her head, transformed herself into the Persian king Achashverosh.

  Helga chronicled the events of the day in her diary. “At two o’clock we went down into the garden for a costume party. I was a girl sailor. In the garden we were given a package of toiletries (soap powder, toothpaste, stationery, a shoehorn, and a notebook), a package of sweets (sugar and cookies), and a bun. Then I went to see Papa, where I ate everything I’d been given. Then I went back home where I ate my bread and sausage, and afterward we played dodgeball in the garden. At a quarter to seven we began our program. We put on a play—Esther.”

  Eva Weiss, born in Brno on June 14, 1923, now lives in England. “She brought a bit of warmth into our lives and instilled in us an appreciation for the arts and a sense of humor, which sometimes
helped us not to take things so seriously, ” says Eva Landa.

  After the play, the children put together what they called a žranice—a “blowout” banquet, although it was certainly a far cry from the feast customarily held on the holiday. There were no hamentashen—the traditional triangular Purim pastries filled with poppy seeds or prune butter. All they could bring to the table were a few slices of bread that had been saved for the occasion and a bit of margarine that was spread on the bread, which was then toasted on the hot stove until the margarine melted. Over this they sprinkled a pinch of sugar or paprika. Sometimes Ela could add something to such feasts—a tomato, a carrot, or a piece of red bell pepper that had been secretly taken, at considerable risk, by her mother, who worked in the fields. These colorful little extras were not much more than decorations, however. To “organize” or “clean up” fruits or vegetables while working in the fields was considered theft by the SS. A “thief” could be severely punished, so great care had to be taken, and only tiny pieces of vegetables would end up on the girls’ bread. “But just to see it!” Helga recalls. “I still remember how impressed I was by it. Even though everyone got just one or two little pieces. But for me it was a feast for the eyes—it was done with such love!”

  This, too, was primarily the work of the imaginative Eva Weiss. She was constantly coming up with variations on the žranice. Sometimes sugar and margarine were combined in a pan and set on the stove to make “candy,” gooey little roasted bonbons that were passed around as “sweet nothings.” Or a potato was sliced, sprinkled with paprika, and roasted. Sometimes flour and yeast were formed into a dough that was filled with a piece of onion or a little mustard. Or a “cake” would be magically created from painstakingly saved bits of buns, with an icing that looked like chocolate but was actually ersatz coffee powder. These buns—simple yeast pastries baked in the shape of rolls—were sometimes so doughy that, despite their rather bland taste, at least one could chew on them for quite a while.