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

by Hannelore Brenner-Wonschick; Hannelore Brenner

  A žranice was always a great event for the girls; that Purim was no exception. As they usually did on such occasions, the girls joined hands and shouted their cheer made up of nonsense syllables: “Aba cucka funde muka funde kave kave cuka, ab cuk, funde muk—funde kave kave cuk.” Then they dug in. “We each had two slices of bread with curds and half a slice with mincemeat,” Helga recalls. “After that came something sweet with coffee cream and sweetened sour milk. After the žranice we exchanged presents. I got a little purse, a brooch, and a heart on a stickpin.”

  Tuesday, March 23, 1943

  Put everything in order! We were finished by eleven. At three we went to the theater. The play was about Ahasver [sic], not the way it’s taught in Jewish history, but rather as a comedy, because Purim is a happy, not a sad feast. Everyone laughed. But not me. I don’t know why?!…

  I’ve become more serious here somehow. Yesterday Mimi gave me a necklace with a pendant as a belated Purim present. Lea was doing better, she hadn’t had a fever for six days, but she’s worse again. She’s got a new infection, this time in the left lung. …

  When I was still at home I never paid any attention to nature. But I do here in Theresienstadt. Our windows look to the west, and we cannot see the sun rise. But at six o’clock I always go to the toilet in the hall, which has windows facing east. What beautiful mornings! I’ve been watching now for several days: budding trees, blue sky, and a red, rising sun. I completely forgot that I’ve been here now for two months.

  In her diary, Helga described the layout of Theresienstadt:

  The town consists of eleven barracks. Only men are housed in the Sudeten Barracks, only women in the Hamburg Barracks. The Hohenelbe Barracks is a hospital. Instead of police we have the Ghetto Guard, which is quartered in what was once the German House on the other side of the barricades. You see Aryan people moving about there, too. The streets leading to it are closed to us by barricades. The street leading from the brewery to the Sudeten Barracks is marked with a Q; the one from the Hannover to the Aussig Barracks with an L. Papa lives at L 231 and I live at L 410. There’s a health authority here, whose head is a young physician, Dr. Munk. There is supposed to be an infirmary in every building with over four hundred people, but only a very few have one. We have two infirmaries and an outpatient clinic. Children are well looked after here. We go once a month to be measured and weighed. For fresh air we go to the ramparts, which is not open to adults. It’s open three days a week. There are public showers, and also a few stores where if you have a special pass you can buy things with ghetto money. There are two shoe stores, two for women’s clothes, two for men’s clothes, one children’s store, one for luggage, one for fancy goods, two for linens, a drugstore, a glass shop, and a general store. You’re given permission to buy a certain amount of linens, clothes, and shoes each year. You can get herbal tea and ground pepper, paprika and caraway at the general store.*

  The layout of Theresienstadt, from Vera Nath’s album

  Almost without realizing it, Helga became caught up in the daily life of Room 28. She no longer felt like a stranger. Her shyness had gone, giving way to feelings of friendship and solidarity. Helga became increasingly aware that none of the girls had freely chosen to live in Room 28. Deep in their hearts all of them hoped for the day when they would once again be free. But Helga sometimes felt that some of her roommates had become more accustomed to this difficult situation than others, possibly because they realized that there was no alternative but to transform this forced community into some sort of congenial home until the war’s end. Pavla Seiner, Lenka Lindt, Eva Landa, Handa Pollak, and Eva Winkler were among those girls. They tried hard to make a true community out of Room 28. Flaška did, too.

  Helga admired the devoted way Flaška looked after the other girls and tried to console them when things got bad. She seemed to manage her daily chores with a light touch. In the morning, as the girls were making their beds, Flaška could often be heard calling to Ela, who shared a bed with her: “Elinéz, Šmelinéz, Rolinéz, Malinéz, Roliz”—it was one of her nonsense rhymes that always got the girls giggling.

  Flaška, Lenka, Ela, Zajíček, Maria, Handa, and Fiška—this was the group of girls to which Helga was becoming increasingly attracted with each passing day. Vivacious Ela, Flaška with her lively imagination, and beautiful, dark-eyed Maria—Helga liked them all. Tella encouraged her wards’ musical talent and was delighted when these three, her best singers, formed a trio. Sometimes they rehearsed in L 410’s cellar, where an old harmonium stood on rickety legs.

  By this time the cellar in L 410 had become an all-purpose social hall. Sometimes it was used for little stage productions, like the one put on by Walter Freund with his puppet theater. Sometimes there were art exhibitions, lectures, or discussions. Once or twice it was used for a Passover seder. But mostly it was a rehearsal space, where the girls worked on their plays and Tella rehearsed her girls’ choir.

  The choir, which was made up of sopranos, second sopranos, altos, and soloists, had a fine sound, and it was Tella’s pride and joy. The repertoire ranged from Czech and German folk songs to classical music and Hebrew melodies. Girls who didn’t measure up to Tella’s musical standards weren’t allowed to participate, much to the disappointment of some. One of them, Eva Landa, would sometimes just sit there and listen to the beautiful music that carried out into the street, where passersby would stop for a moment to enjoy it.

  “The best part,” Ela recalls, “was when the room had turned dark and we would sing these wonderful Hebrew songs. Even when we didn’t understand every word of what we were singing, our soloists, our choir, they just sounded so lovely! We really believed we were very good singers.”

  In the spring of 1943 Kamilla Rosenbaum, a dancer and choreographer from Prague, began rehearsals in the basement of L 410 with the younger children for Broučci (Firefly), a dance poem based on the children’s book by Pastor Jan Karafiats. A collaboration with other committed artists, it soon became an ambitious theater project. Vlasta Schönová, a young actress who had studied directing in Prague, set to work adapting the story for the stage; the artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis designed colorful, imaginative costumes together with the children; Adolf Aussenberg and Franta Pick created the set; and Karel Svenk, a cabaret artist from Prague, arranged the music based on Czech folk songs.

  Eva Weiss, an enthusiastic dancer, assisted Kamilla and helped the children learn Slavic and Czech dances. She also had a role in the production. “I still recall the first song exactly. I leaped onto the stage and we danced to a wonderful medley.”

  A special attraction in the cellar were the puppet plays put on by Walter Freund, a lawyer from Moravia and the chief elder at the Girls’ Home. In Theresienstadt he had thrown himself into his great passion, puppet theater, devoting every free minute to it. His handmade marionettes were masterly works of art that enhanced the children’s enjoyment of his productions. Among his best-known plays was A Girl Travels to the Promised Land, for which the renowned former designer made the sets and Friedl Dicker-Brandeis created the costumes. But other plays also remained in the girls’ memories, such as A Camel Went Through the Eye of a Needle by František Langer and The Enchanted Violin.

  Gideon Klein was a fascinating and strikingly handsome young man. He often accompanied Brundibár rehearsals on the piano. “He was a friend of Tella’s,” Ela Stein recalls, “and once he even composed a song for our choir, which we then rehearsed with Tella. It went, ‘Kushiba, Kushiba—a black man comes from Africa.’”

  In these sorts of productions the old harmonium usually played a lead role. Although it was out of tune and several of its keys were always sticking, it was one of the most prized instruments in the Girls’ Home. Sometimes it was even brought up to the top floor, to Room 28, as we learn from an essay Handa Pollak wrote in October 1943:

  Before the premiere of The Bartered Bride, Tella, along with a few of the girls, brought the harmonium up to our room and played the opera for us. She
explained everything, so that we would know the story and could concentrate on the music. The next day we went to the gym at L 417, which was full when we arrived. I found a spot close to the piano. I’d heard The Bartered Bride three times in Prague, but it was never as beautiful as it was there. What Rafael Schächter, the conductor, was able to accomplish was a real miracle. Back at the Home, the talk revolved around the food, the “sluices,” passes for getting in and out, and work in the fields. I felt like someone who is caught up in dreams of beautiful things and is suddenly torn out of her dreams and wakes up—and everything is as gray and ordinary as ever. I just kept thinking about The Bartered Bride, and even as I dozed off I could hear “Our True Love.”

  Sometimes, toward evening, the Girls’ Home became unusually quiet as lovely voices came from the old vaulted cellar. Everyone knew that Rafael Schächter, the celebrated and multifaceted musician—conductor, pianist, composer, and great inspiration to Czech musical life—was rehearsing with his choir and preparing for a new performance.

  Schächter’s legendary Theresienstadt productions—Bedřich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride and The Kiss, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute—all had their genesis in the cellar of L 410. “After work I often slipped down to the cellar,” Eva Weiss recalls. “I would squeeze into a corner and stay very quiet, and so I was allowed to listen. There stood the old rickety harmonium that Tella often played. And it was there that I heard Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro for the first time, and The Bartered Bride, too. And of course the Requiem! I heard the Requiem so often that even today I can still sing most of it in Latin in my mind.”

  Verdi’s Requiem—a funeral mass about dying, redemption, consolation, and resurrection—performed in Theresienstadt by Jewish prisoners in death’s waiting room! It was one of the ghetto’s most stirring and unforgettable concerts. As the music critic Kurt Singer wrote at the time—despite his own objections to the choice of this work—it was “the greatest artistic accomplishment born and presented thus far in Theresienstadt, an achievement that also demanded the most meticulous preparation … a triumphant success for Rafael Schächter and his choir… a masterpiece.”12 And although it was meant for adults, it impressed a great many children as well.

  “I heard only the rehearsals. I don’t think that I ever attended a performance,” Helga says. “And yet—it made such a deep impression on me that years later in England, when I was asked what I wanted to see on my twenty-first birthday, I said Verdi’s Requiem.”

  Magically drawn by the music, many of the girls would slip down to gather outside the cellar door. If it wasn’t Rafael Schächter or Gideon Klein sitting at the old harmonium, then it was Tella, who accompanied the rehearsals, with Handa sitting beside her.13 “I was the one who turned pages of the score. Because of that I was allowed to be present at rehearsals,” Handa says. “Those rehearsals—they left a very, very strong impression. Even today I can still hear the voices of the chorus: ‘Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla, teste David cum Sibylla … Lacrymosa dies illa, qua resurget ex favilla judicandus homo reus… Agnus Dei, qui tollis pecatta mundi, dona eis requiem.’ Or the final prayer: ‘Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna, in die illa tremenda, quando coeli movendi sunt et terra.’ (‘Free me, O Lord, from eternal death on that dreadful day when heaven and earth shall be moved.’) For me, that work—and music in general in Theresienstadt—was an extraordinary experience. It was as if angels were singing in hell.”

  Flaška also occasionally tiptoed down to the cellar to be closer to these musical events. Music was—and still is—the elixir of her life. Once she even had the chance to audition for the role of Bastienne, alongside Piňt’a Mühlstein, who was to play Bastien, and his sister Maria, who had the role of Kolas the magician. “But it wasn’t easy for us,” Flaška recalls. “It was hard to live up to Rafael Schächter’s expectations. He set the highest standards. We rehearsed the Mozart opera for maybe two weeks. Then he decided to present it in concert form with adult singers.”

  Rafael Schächter (d. 1945)

  But this decision did not spell the end of Flaška’s musical career. She continued to sing in the girls’ choir. She especially loved singing in the trio, which had taken on an unusual assignment. Flaška, Ela, and Maria would occasionally go to the quarters where the elderly people lived, to serenade them but also to offer them practical help. The girls did not do this for fun; it was hard work, a task given to them by an organization called Yad Tomechet (“Helping Hand” in Hebrew). Yad Tomechet was a youth organization founded in Theresienstadt in the late summer of 1942 by leading members of the Hechalutz movement and the Youth Welfare Office. They had agreed that something had to be done to try to alleviate the misery of the elderly inmates of Theresienstadt, however hopeless this seemed to be.

  Beginning in the summer of 1942, elderly men and women arrived in Theresienstadt by the thousands, primarily from Germany and Austria. Many of them presented some piece of paper with the name of what they believed to be a hotel or a boardinghouse, claiming that they had reservations there. Some of the Jews from Germany had even signed a so-called Heimeinkaufsvertrag (“home purchase agreement”), for which they had been induced to hand over their remaining assets. The Germans had assured them that in return they were going to be given fine homes “in the spa town of Theresienstadt,” where they would spend their later years in peace. And now these people, some from once well-to-do families, found themselves locked up in a sealed ghetto. They were crammed into military barracks, often in wretched attics or cellars, amid dirt, noise, and foul odors, with nothing to sleep on but straw-filled mattresses or just the bare floor. Many of them could not get to the toilets and washrooms, because these were too far from where they slept and were impossible to reach without assistance. They never had enough water or food, and what food they could get was practically inedible. The elderly quickly lost hope and the will to live. The number of suicides rose rapidly.

  What could be done for these people? Perhaps the youngsters could be encouraged to help them. And so, at the suggestion of Hebrew teacher Ben-Zion Weiss, Yad Tomechet was founded. Over time, a large number of boys and girls joined in and helped to care for the elderly. The young people brought them their meager meals from the kitchen, accompanied them to the toilet, bathed them, cleaned their dismal sleeping quarters, and helped them pack when their names came up for transport to the East.

  The girls in Room 28 also tried to think of ways to help. At first they set up a schedule of greeting new arrivals and helping the elderly with their heavy baggage. But that didn’t work, because the new arrivals, thinking they were coming to a spa, were so horrified at their surrounding that they were initially incapable of comprehending their situation. Some did not trust the girls, especially those who did not speak German. Thinking that the girls were trying to steal their baggage, they brusquely waved aside those who sought to help them.

  So the girls looked for other ways to be useful. Soon they were going straight to the quarters of the elderly. “If someone had a birthday, for example,” recalls Flaška, “we just went over, wished the person a happy birthday, and helped out a little—beating mattresses, cleaning up for them. And then those of us in the trio would sing a little something. We had practiced a lot of songs with Tella just for that purpose. And sometimes we sang our own words to the tune of Schumann’s Träumerei.”

  “Once we even sang a Dutch song especially for people from Holland,” Ela recalls. “It was called ‘Wade blanke.’ To this day I don’t know what it means, but the melody still runs through my head.”

  Sometimes the girls gave the elderly little gifts, usually handkerchiefs that the Youth Welfare Office had provided. The old people would then rummage helplessly through their paltry possessions, hoping to find something for the children. But there were no cookies, no chocolates, no bonbons. They had nothing to offer, and the children knew it, and at such moments they would quickly take their leave.

  One of Flaška’
s outstanding qualities is her desire to help people. She may have inherited this from her mother, for whom the education of her children in the spirit of enlightened humanism was paramount. Elisabeth Flach even wrote a book titled The Most Important Question in Life. No less than Tomáš G. Masaryk, the revered president of Czechoslovakia, had a copy in his library, for which he had sent a thank-you letter to Elisabeth Flach. For many years this letter was among her most treasured possessions.

  Her mother’s influence only partly explains Flaška’s compassionate nature. She had also been sensitized to suffering by the bitter experiences shared by this whole generation of Jewish children during the years leading up to their deportation. Some may have hoped that life in the Theresienstadt ghetto in the company of others in the same circumstances would be an improvement over the nightmare they had just left. They were sadly mistaken. But the miserable conditions in Theresienstadt did help forge a sense of community and solidarity—even for an eleven-year-old girl. When Flaška was finally released from a long stay in the hospital, where she had wound up shortly after her arrival, she hurried off to see her father and brother in the Hohenelbe Barracks. And she was determined not to arrive empty-handed. “I was so happy I could bring them a gift, a piece of bread that I saved especially for them.”