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

by Hannelore Brenner-Wonschick; Hannelore Brenner

  And there was something else, too. On July 7, 1943, the last transport of children from the Prague orphanage had arrived in Theresienstadt. With it came Ota Freudenfeld, the legendary head of the orphanage, and his son, Rudolf. The arrival of this transport drew everyone’s attention, especially that of the children who had lived in the orphanage on Belgicka Street prior to their own deportation. Decades later, Rudolf Freu denfeld would recall their arrival:

  As news spread through town that the head of the orphanage had arrived, the streets near the “sluice” were lined with children. My father passed through the crowd, happy to be among his children again. And they welcomed him the way you greet someone you hold most dear—with childlike love amidst all that misery.

  That evening, Rafik [Rafael Schächter] arranged for a concert performance in our honor, in one of the attics, of The Bartered Bride, with a piano instead of an orchestra. After the performance, I proudly pulled out the score for Brundibár, and we decided then and there that I should begin rehearsing with the children.1

  The news spread through the ghetto like wildfire, and it wasn’t long before Tella sent her best musical talents to the attic of Boys’ Home 417, where Rafael Schächter and Rudolf Freudenfeld were holding tryouts and making their choices among the many candidates for the various roles in the opera.

  “There were three of us from our room—Flaška, Maria Mühlstein, and me. And we had to stand in a row and each had to sing up and down the scale, la la la.” Ela Stein has vivid memories of the casting of Brundibár. “When my turn came I shook with fright at the thought that I wouldn’t sing well enough. But then Rudi Freudenfeld said to me, ‘You know what? You’ll play a cat.’—A cat in a children’s opera? That was something extraordinary!”

  Gushing with joy, Ela brought the sensational news to her mother and uncle. “ ‘A children’s opera?’ they said in amazement. They couldn’t imagine what that might be. But they were so happy that I’d got the role.”

  Maria Mühlstein had reason to be happy as well. She was chosen for the role of the sparrow; her brother Piňt’a got the male lead role of little Pepíček. The female lead, Aninka, Pepíček’s sister, went to Greta Hofmeister from the Girls’ Home, Room 25; she had already sung in Smetana’s Bartered Bride and Verdi’s Requiem. Zdeněk Ohrenstein from Room 1, L 417, was cast as the dog.

  The other roles were assigned as well: a baker, a milkman, an icecream vendor, and a policeman.2 There were children who would play the people at the market and others who formed the chorus of schoolchildren. Among these were several girls from Room 28: Flaška, Handa, Zajíček, and Ruth Gutmann.

  The title role of the evil organ-grinder Brundibár was given to Honza Treichlinger, an orphan from Plzeň. Rudolf Freudenfeld later recalled the manner in which this casting took place: “He had virtually begged for the role. We became acquainted in the washroom. He came up beside me, pretending to wash his hands, and casually remarked, ‘I’ve heard that you’re looking for children for your opera. Can I come, too?’ ”

  Later, when the time came to cast the role of Brundibár, Honza came up to Rudolf Freudenfeld again and asked him in his special way, “Could I give it a try?” From that moment on there was only one Brundibár—Honza Treichlinger.

  A second and third cast of understudies were chosen for all the main roles. Stephan Sommer, the son of the Prague pianist Alice Herz-Sommer, enthusiastically practiced the role of the sparrow. Piňt’a Mühlstein’s brother Eli likewise studied the role of Pepíček, and his sister, Maria, rehearsed as first understudy for the role of Aninka. “She had a beautiful velvety voice,” Flaška recalls. “She was so natural. A very different type from Greta Hofmeister, who was a little older than we were.”

  In the days that followed, boys and girls came streaming from all corners to gather in the hot, sultry attic of Boys’ Home L 417—Danka, Daša, Raja, Hanka, Sonja, Ruth, Eva, Lilian, Lisa, Hana, Drixi, Renate, Zdenka, Marta, Jiři, František, Hanuš, Petr, Pavel, Rudi, Karel, and Zdeněk. For some of these children, the world suddenly seemed to revolve around nothing but rehearsals—and around Baštík, their nickname for Rudolf Freudenfeld, who often arrived at rehearsals exhausted and bathed in sweat after a hard day’s work in a stone quarry in nearby Litoměřice. Still, nothing could keep him from dedicating his evenings to Brundibár—although it certainly was not all that easy, as Rudolf Laub wrote in the newspaper Vedem:

  Have any of you ever been a director and had to deal with fifty strapping boys and charming girls who are convinced that the more noise and fun during the rehearsals, the better? No, it’s not easy, and I take my hat off to Rudi Freudenfeld, because throughout the rehearsals he got angry only a few times, and then calmed down again immediately. I would not have had that patience, and I doubt whether anybody else would have either.

  But some sort of aura held us together, the feeling that “when it’s finished, it’ll be super.” We made progress, we got a better rehearsal room, and interest grew. Everybody began to look forward to rehearsals, and would tell his acquaintances with a certain pride, “We’re rehearsing a children’s opera.”3

  Of course the people who had taken on these young actors were themselves outstanding personalities who lent a special luster to the enterprise. Along with Baštík, Rafik, and Gideon Klein, there were the play’s set designer and artistic director, František Zelenka, and Brundibár’s composer, Hans Krása. The two of them kept a close eye on the rehearsals of the children’s opera, and while Hans Krása set to work reorchestrating the music according to the instruments and musicians available in Theresienstadt, František Zelenka prepared a modest set design and a poster announcing the upcoming premiere.

  Hans Krása. “His creative process seems effortless, somewhere between check and checkmate, but the result displays uncanny sureness.” These were the words Viktor Ullmann chose to praise the composer in 1928.

  The rehearsals for Brundibár generated considerable excitement—and disappointment as well. “I remember feeling very hurt,” Eva Landa says, “because I didn’t get the role of the schoolgirl who throws her book in the air. I wanted so much to play it. But another girl, Hana Vohrysková, was chosen.”

  Eva was not the only girl who was feeling out of sorts in those days. Helga was crushed when out of the blue Rita Böhm, their new counselor, scolded her, saying, “You are one of the first girls that I shall think badly of if you don’t settle down at once.” All Helga had done was chuckle while Rita was talking about England. In reality she was hardly in the mood for laughter—Rita’s descriptions of England had awakened a dreadful longing for her mother.

  “Should I tell her?” she asked in her diary. “I’ve got to explain it somehow. I really do like Rita an awful lot, and that’s why this hurts even more.” Helga made herself talk it over with Rita. “A quarter to eleven in the evening: Rita is no longer angry at me.”

  Others were experiencing some of these same feelings, these emotional ups and downs. Friendships formed, encountered their first snag, broke apart, and were then renewed. Jealousy played no small part in this carousel of friendship. No sooner had a girl shown another more attention than her old friend felt rejected, no longer loved. Misunderstandings, taunts, and defiance followed. Then came attempts at renewing the relationship and reconciliation. Friendship was everything for these girls—life, love, the future. A girl’s own visions, dreams, and hopes were reflected in the eyes of her friend. They both drew energy from their relationship, took heart from it.

  Flaška and Lenka were quite fond of each other. Flaška found in Lenka a friend whom she admired greatly, with whom she could laugh and discuss many things. They did not always see eye to eye, and sometimes they fell out, for Lenka was the epitome of a critical spirit. But Flaška always brought them back together. She had a definite need for harmony, and worked very hard to be friendly and fair with everyone.

  But the two friends eventually had a row. For Flaška this was no great problem, since she was convinced that the quarrel wou
ld soon be forgotten. For Lenka, however, it was a minor catastrophe. She withdrew inside herself—what choice did she have? It was impossible for them to stay out of each other’s way, to keep the distance that would allow them to move closer together when they were ready to do so. The only retreat possible was an inward one.

  And so Lenka wrote a poem.

  REACTION TO A QUARREL WITH FLAŠKA

  I wanted to be good

  And have tried very hard,

  But in just the shortest time

  The girls have

  Disappointed me.

  They didn’t respect my effort,

  And I have tried

  To deal with that.

  And they asked me

  Why I was not able

  To get rid of the bad in me.

  But I am trying!

  And I will keep on trying

  And will prove to Flaška

  That I have reached my goal.

  I will, I must—

  In the shortest time.

  And the next time

  They accuse me of the same thing again,

  I will not get angry.

  I will quietly move toward my goal.

  And come closer to it with each day.

  Until I can say to Eva

  I have arrived at my goal

  And I shall keep going on

  Until I am in Ma’agal,

  Alongside Eva,

  And then higher still.

  And Flaška will no longer be able to say

  That I am not trying.

  Just the opposite,

  She will stand aside and wonder

  How I could reach the heavens,

  Because I shall be as high as the sky.

  A few days later, Flaška and Lenka renewed their friendship and confirmed it in blood. They pricked their fingertips and with drops of blood wrote on a piece of paper: “We, Flaška and Lenka, pledge our eternal loyalty and friendship.” They buried the paper on the grounds of the ramparts.

  Meanwhile, Helga was taking a good hard look at herself. Was she also uncooperative, egoistic, intolerant, as Tella was constantly upbraiding others for being? She confided her crisis of confidence to her diary: “I have to speak with Tella again. What happened was: I was just starting to get used to life in the Home when Ela disappointed me. I didn’t want to begin another friendship all over again for fear of further disappointment. But I forgot one thing, and Tella is truly right about this: Be strict with yourself, but more tolerant and gentle with others. I need to follow that rule.”

  These were tense times, and everyone was on edge. The temperature had been high for days. Life was barely endurable under the roof of the Girls’ Home. No wonder their Sabbath service just wouldn’t go right. “Frau Mühlstein prayed and lit the candles. Normally we play games afterward. This time someone read aloud, but many girls were already on their bunks, some had even fallen asleep. Of twenty-seven girls there were seven at the table. What an impossible Sabbath. Ruth, who had made the arrangements for the evening, was so disappointed that she cried.”

  Even Ma’agal was not as successful as it had been earlier. During this period not one new member was chosen for the “circle of perfection.” But those who were already in Ma’agal decided to divide it into three classes. No one made it into the first class; in the second were Handa and Muška, with Irena, Pavla, Eva Landa, and Eva Heller in the third.

  Helga was a bit hurt that she had been excluded from this select circle. “I will try hard to be the way the girls would like me to be. I would like to be better than I have been until now. I want to reach a higher level. I have to get into Ma’agal,” she wrote in her diary while standing at the window, shortly before midnight. Then she spent a long time gazing out into the night. “What a lovely sight! Everyone asleep. The whole town wrapped in darkness, and oppressive heat brooding over the entire region. There is a deep serenity, with only a bird chirping here or there. Some lights are on in the factory, where you can hear the regular thumping of the hammer. It reminds me of something, though I don’t know what.”

  The counselors joined forces to try to relieve the tension in Room 28. On July 16 they celebrated the birthday of Karel Pollak, Handa’s father, whom everyone called Strejda (Uncle). The girls put on a little play entitled Twenty-five Years Later, which focused on Fiška and her problems, with Eva Stern as an absentminded doctor carrying a scalpel in her shoes, storing a hypodermic in a wastebasket, and the like. Then the counselors presented the surprise the girls had been anticipating for days. “It was very amusing. They had written a funny rhyme to sing about each of us. They were unrecognizable in their costumes. Tella had braids done up in red nets, a very short dirndl skirt, with underwear that reached below her knees. Instead of stockings she had painted red stripes on her legs. And her cheeks were red, too. Laura was wearing a man’s formal coat, a top hat, and a genuine mustache made of curls. Eva Weiss wore a long skirt like those worn in the nineteenth century, a black hat with feathers, and a velvet cape that was cut to look like a fur. Her eyebrows were painted red. No one would have recognized her.”

  Eva Weiss gave each girl a sketch with an appropriate verse. Helga’s picture showed a girl just leaving sick bay, with the words: “A girl named Helga / was a long time ill / she’s back again now / thanks to God’s good will.” After each stanza was the refrain: “Yes, yes, yes / it’s as clear as day / Yes, yes, yes / it’s true in its way.”

  On July 25 the Youth Welfare Office put on a program in one of the barracks to honor the memory of Theodor Herzl. There was a speech by Gonda Redlich, a performance by Tella’s girls’ choir from L 410, a poem recited by an actress, and a ballet that depicted the story of the slaves in ancient Egypt. “I forgot to join in the singing, because I was dreaming,” Helga jotted in her diary that evening. “I was standing at a window in the attic, gazing out on a picture come to life—a tree-lined road near Litoměřice. I could even see as far as the clock and, at some distance, little villages in the valley and on the hill, surrounded by splendid golden fields framed with woods and mountains.”

  Was liberation near? Helga’s “picture come to life” was followed three days later by news that spread like the wind and set every heart in Theresienstadt aflutter. “And now for something very new,” Helga wrote on July 28. “Mussolini abdicated yesterday, and I’ve been almost crazy ever since. I have this strange feeling, like the one I had when Papa moved to Kyjov to join us for good. Three days ago I said, the war is coming to an end. But I didn’t feel anything. It seemed so unreal, faraway, but now I sense it is very close. I would like to dance, if I only could, and sing. I’m going to go crazy.”

  At the end of July, Theresienstadt was still baking under a merciless dome of heat. The temperature had reached ninety-five degrees in the shade. Days went by without a drop of rain. Unwelcome denizens of the town crept out of their hideaways and began to multiply out of control: bedbugs, lice, fleas. Above all, bedbugs. Suddenly the little black beasts could be seen, smelled, and heard tap, tap, tapping everywhere—on mattresses, beams, floors, and walls, in suitcases and shoes.

  “Bedbugs. Bedbugs. The dreadful word sent a wave of horror throughout Theresienstadt,” Hana Lissau wrote when she described the plague in an essay she composed six weeks later. “One day one of the girls in Room 28 found this horrible animal boring its way into her wooden bunk. She went into hysterics. When she had regained control of herself, she joined several other girls in banging against the wood of various planks, and then came the real horror—bedbugs, bedbugs everywhere, a sea of bedbugs! Bedbugs wherever you looked, nothing but bedbugs. We murdered whole families of bedbugs that day. They died wherever their enemy, human beings, appeared. It was simply impossible to stay in bed. We slept on the floor and in the hall, and the girls who remained in their bunks were covered all over with little red spots. Only gas can destroy these vermin—that was the word on everyone’s lips, because gas was the only, the ultimate salvation. People kept coming into the room
to inspect the bizarre situation.”

  “I can still recall,” Judith Schwarzbart says, “how we dragged our mattresses and bedclothes outside, cleaned and beat and aired them in the garden—they were full of bedbugs. It was a terrible plague.”

  “It was worst between the wooden planks,” Eva Weiss adds. “The cracks were black, black with bedbugs. Battalions of bedbugs! They had to spray the rooms. And at the entrance there was a sign, black print on yellow: GAS. BEWARE. MAY BE LETHAL. With a skull at the top.”

  “We slept in the hall a second night because of the bedbugs. Seven girls slept outside. We are all covered with bites,” Helga reported on July 31. “We have permission to sleep in the garden, because you can’t really sleep in the hall, since many Homes get up at five and raise a ruckus. Spraying didn’t help at all. I caught six fleas and three bedbugs last night. Now wasn’t that a successful hunt! And I didn’t even need a gun. Something fell into my shoe. Walter, one of our Home’s elders, killed whatever it was. Now I’m going to join Ela and Jiřinka to make a ‘tent’ for tonight.”

  It was not until the night of August 4 that the first real thunderstorm arrived. Some girls went to the window to watch the jagged lightning bolts cut across the nighttime sky. Others climbed onto their neighbors’ bunks for a better look at the spectacle. The storm was directly overhead for a good while. Each bolt was instantly followed by a clap of thunder—loud and eerie. Gradually the tension ebbed, as the girls fell into a deep sleep.

  But there was still something in the air, an unidentifiable sense of unease that the thunderstorm had not swept away. “I’d like to know what the Germans have up their sleeves. They’ve emptied out the Sudeten Barracks and the armory,” Helga jotted in her diary on July 31. “The entire Sudeten Barracks has to be completely evacuated within forty-eight hours. I saw a whole crowd of people moving their things. It’s how I picture a retreat during war. And Papa told me that I was right about that.”