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

by Hannelore Brenner-Wonschick; Hannelore Brenner

  No sooner are we awake than we begin airing our beds. “Get out of bed!” someone says, while someone else calls out, “Today’s my turn to use the window!” A third girl chimes in with: “What do you mean; you’re supposed to use the table today!”—“Then I’ll wait until Lissau’s done, and use the window!”—“But I called dibs on that!”

  Almost everyone dresses very slowly. “Zajíček, get up, it’s seven o’clock already!”—“Fiška, get dressed, the others have already washed up.” They are all back from the washroom. “First group, take everything in and make your beds!”—“Who’s on toranoot today?”— “Didi, you haven’t done it for a long time!”—“I’m not allowed to carry anything.”

  It takes a good while until someone is chosen to fetch food for us all. The cleaning brigade tidies up the room, while the rest sit on their beds, talking or putting their things in order. Some, still sitting on their bunks, quickly shove some food in their mouths, although that isn’t allowed. If a counselor catches us at it, we’re put under house arrest. At nine o’clock we sit around the table and eat breakfast. We’re not having any lessons this week. We’re allowed a half hour for breakfast. Tella: “Clear the table! Go outside for a while now, so we can sweep up. Afterward I’ll tell you what we’re going to do.”

  We’re supposed to take work with us to the garden. It takes a while until at least a few girls comply and go outside, but most stay in the room. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m cold!”—“I’m not going to cart all this downstairs!”—“I’ve got nothing to wear!” One after the other they find an excuse for not going down to the garden. But the main reason, which no one says, is that we’re all lazybones and want only to loll around on our beds. But if boys were involved, almost all of them would fly downstairs as if somebody had fired a gun in the room—except for a couple of us, including me.

  Of twenty-two girls, ten go down to the garden. There we sit on school benches without a table. In each corner of the garden are benches of some sort. We put them in a little square and sit huddled together, to keep from being cold, while we chat or darn our underwear and stockings, knit, play cards, or whatever. Two hours pass like this—it seems like half an hour to us—until a counselor sticks her head out the window: “Time for lunch! Who’s on toranoot?”— “Where’s Eva Stern gone again?”—“A couple of you need to go fetch the food right now, otherwise we’ll get nothing to eat. Eva Winkler, you’re one of them!”—“I’m not allowed to carry anything!” And Rutka: “But you can do handstands on the ramparts, can’t you!”

  Room 28, drawn by Maria Mühlstein

  The voice of the counselor can be heard again, calling each girl by name, but they all find some excuse. Now it’s Helena’s turn, who pretends she doesn’t hear, while the girls call out in saccharine voices: “Leave poor little Helena alone, she’s doing her history homework. It would break her heart to tear herself away from it.” The mood is edgy. We have to get hold of ourselves. I like it when Helena flies into a rage and starts her river of sobs, until she finally sounds like a howling hyena. Then come a few caustic remarks, and we hear Helena’s pretty voice: “Well, how would you all feel?” After all her shouts and curses, Helena goes to fetch our midday meal anyway. A quarter-hour later we’re called upstairs. After lunch, those on toranoot clean up, and the others go to visit their parents. We have to be back in the Home by three o’clock. If the weather’s nice, we go to the ramparts— once again, reluctantly of course. “I don’t like to walk!”—“My shoes pinch!”—“That’s no fun!”—the same sort of excuses we’ve heard all day. But once we’re on the ramparts, no one wants to go home. By the time evening rolls around, some of us are back with our parents. But by a quarter to nine, we have to have washed up and be in the Home, or at a quarter after eight if we’ve not washed yet. If there is an evening program, we have to be in the Home by eight, and we go to bed right away, but that rarely happens. If there is no program, we don’t hurry, just talk—no one even thinks of undressing. That’s the job of the counselors. “Off to bed with you! Lights out in five minutes! Whether you have your pajamas on or not.”

  Now it gets hectic, and within fifteen minutes the room is dark. Here and there you can hear suppressed laughs and whispered words that were too loud all the same. After a few minutes there’s not another word—only the regular breathing of girls asleep.

  Along with Milka—her real name was Bohumila Poláček—two other girls had come to Room 28: Vera Nath and Hana Wertheimer, who was nicknamed Hanka. The three had known one another in Prague, where they had been stranded after their flights from their hometowns. Hanka was originally from Znojmo, Vera from Opava. Both towns were in the Sudetenland, the border region of the Czech Republic that contained a German majority. The Sudetenland had been under German rule since the autumn of 1938. Milka came from Chrastany, a small town in southern Bohemia.

  The new roommates awakened old memories in those who knew them from Prague—above all memories of their time together at Hagibor, the Jewish athletic field. Pavla Seiner and Hanka Wertheimer— both tall, athletic girls—had been among the best dodgeball players there. Everyone wanted Hanka in particular on their team, for not only could she run fast and catch a hard-thrown ball, but she could also throw with real power.

  Hagibor. For every Holocaust survivor who had spent time on the Jewish athletic field in Prague-Strašnice between 1940 and 1942, the very word evoked hope and confidence. In the midst of hatred, prohibitions, persecution, and fear, that place was like an island, where the word “future” was infused with life and where Jewish children’s self-confidence, which had been so badly undermined, could be rebuilt and restored. “When I think of Hagibor, I think of happy times,” Hanka recalls enthusiastically. “Hagibor was a very long way from our apartment, and I often walked the whole distance. Sometimes if I couldn’t find a friend to go with me, I hid my yellow star and went by streetcar. To avoid arousing suspicion I would go one stop farther and then walk back. But of course I was always afraid.”

  Bohumila (“Milka”) Poláček (far right) in the garden of her house in Chrastany. With her are (left to right) her cousin Hanus Lederer; her father, Vojteč Poláček; her brother, Jiri Poláček; and her cousin Hanna Lederer.

  But once they were there, the fear was forgotten for a little while. Through athletics, games, and songs, the pressure on a group of psychologically battered children fell away for a few hours. “We were almost happy at Hagibor,” Eva Landa recalls. “There was something resembling normal life for us on the athletic field. There were track-and-field events, gymnastics, acrobatics; we could ice-skate in winter. It often felt like the Spartacus Games. There were various competitions and team games. We danced and sang—especially Zionist songs.”

  Fredy Hirsch at Hagibor, the Jewish athletic field in Prague

  Ela adds, “Toward evening potato soup would be cooked over an open fire. For me, that was always the best part. I can still taste that potato soup.”

  There was a special atmosphere at Hagibor, which is Hebrew for “the strong man.” It was not just about being athletically active, as the very colors of the uniforms indicated. They were blue and white, the colors of the Zionist movement.

  Most important was to instill in the children hope and the courage to face life, and to prepare them to live in Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel. They learned Morse code, practiced tying knots, and sometimes military commands in Hebrew rang out— “Smolah pnei, yeminah pnei, kadimah, tza’ad” (“Left, right, forward march, halt!”)—as children followed the orders of their group leaders, among them Nita Petschau and Dita Sachs, who were in charge of the ten-to-twelve-year-old girls.

  Sometimes, however, the three to four hundred children would come together in rank and file and Fredy Hirsch, the legendary leader of Hagibor and of the Zionist youth organization Hechalutz, would take over, whistle in hand. Whenever Fredy appeared, everything seemed more welcoming. The children loved this young man with his well-trained body and wavy black hair. He
always had a smile and an encouraging word for them. The fact that this émigré from Aachen in Germany spoke broken Czech did not detract in the slightest from the enchantment he radiated.

  “If a young Jew decides to live for his people, he has to go to Hachsharah [Zionist training camp], become a worker in Eretz Yisrael, and conquer the soil. But first and foremost, he must overcome his own fear and lethargy, get involved in sports, do gymnastics, steel his body, and make good use of his competitive drive.”9 These were the words that kept echoing across the Jewish athletic field. Fredy Hirsch was a charismatic speaker, and he inspired many children to become passionate Zionists. To meet him was to remember him forever.

  “Fredy was almost like a god to us,” Eva Landa recalls. “We even sang a song about him, with the melody taken from the Czech folk song ‘Two Wanderers Stood on an Ant Hill.’ It went, ‘Life would be gray without Fredy’s whistle / He whistles so hard we turn pale.’ We sang that song over and over with great enthusiasm.”

  Vera Nath adds: “The person I shall always remember, the person I took to my heart—that was Fredy Hirsch. He did so much for us! He made it possible for us to have a beautiful summer back then in Prague.”

  In the early 1940s nearly all the Jewish children in Prague encountered one another at some point, and many friendships that had begun there were later renewed in Theresienstadt. When Hanka, Milka, and Vera were assigned to Room 28, they saw familiar faces, and so they did not find it too difficult to join in the life of the community.

  Vera Nath had arrived in Theresienstadt on July 8, 1943, and she was glad to be placed in Room 28. She was still in shock: as if by a miracle, she and her family had escaped the September transport. They had already passed through the “sluice” and their baggage had been loaded. Just as they were approaching the train, a young man who could not bear to see his mother go by herself pushed his way forward. The moment he boarded, the quota of twenty-five hundred people was met, and the doors closed. Without a moment’s hesitation, the Nath family turned around.

  Vera was a strikingly pretty girl with gentle, dark eyes. She was dainty and very reserved. It is hard to say if that trait was inborn or the result of her childhood experiences. “I stopped trying to make friends early on,” she says today. “All my friends kept disappearing. I had a close girlfriend in Prague, Suse Pick from Žatec. She and her family were deported to Lodz. Then I was in another group with two boys my age, Rus and Jerry. Their father was a soccer player. We often played together in the Old Jewish Cemetery. They were born in America, which made them American citizens, so they didn’t have to wear a star. Sometimes they brought me ice cream from the grocery store, which had been forbidden to me for some time. But they disappeared, too, from one day to the next. What a horrible thing it is, when friends that you’ve just come to know simply vanish and you don’t know where they went. You simply never hear from them again.”

  It became second nature for Vera not to get too close to anyone, to consciously avoid seeking out friendships. In Theresienstadt she had her parents and her sister—that was the main thing. She became open to friendships much later, after she had begun a new life in Israel and could provide her children with what she had so painfully missed in her own childhood. “Once I had my own children, I made sure that they never had to switch classes or schools. I did not want them torn from familiar surroundings. I didn’t want them to keep losing friends and having to look for new ones.”

  Hanka Wertheimer’s upbringing and attitude were very different. Hanka was a tall, athletic, sociable girl with a winning and hearty laugh. She was accepted into Room 28 from the first, even by girls who did not know her. Hanka had a delightful personality. And as young as she was, she knew what she wanted: She wanted to go to Palestine.

  In her parents’ home, the ideas of Theodor Herzl had been the dominant topic of conversation, and so it was no surprise that she had joined the Zionist youth organization Tekhelet-Lavan (Blue-White) at the age of six. The events of the next few years only intensified Hanka’s longing for Palestine. In Prague, where her parents had fled from Znojmo in the autumn of 1938, Hanka had quickly formed a circle of close friends whose hopes and ideas were bound up with the Zionist cause.

  Hanka met most of these friends again in Theresienstadt, and soon a regular meeting was arranged, every Friday evening, in the little shed in the courtyard of Boys’ Home L 417, which housed an electrical workshop. The group called itself Dror, which is Hebrew for “bird” and a symbol of freedom. They spoke about Palestine, learned Hebrew, expanded their knowledge of agriculture, and discussed the Zionist books they read together. Occasionally they would share a piece of bread or a bun. “And once,” Hanka recalls, “we made cheese out of sour milk and devoured it with gusto.”

  Hanka’s friends Resinka Schwarz and Miriam Rosenzweig were part of the group, as well as a few boys from Home 5—Jiřka Broll, Micha Honigwachs, Yehuda Bacon, and Hanka’s first boyfriend and first love, Yehuda Huppert, who was nicknamed Polda.

  Whenever Hanka took a walk with Polda around the block of Building L 410, she could count on being followed by curious eyes gazing from the upstairs windows. “As soon as we saw one of our girls taking a walk with a boy outside the Home, it was instantly the talk of the room, and soon everyone was at the window to see what they were doing,” Handa recalls. “Are they holding hands? Are they walking close together or apart? Are they kissing? What are they up to? Where are they going? There really wasn’t much to see. These couples were very young and shy. Usually they walked half a mile apart. But all the same—it was always very exciting for the rest of us.”

  Especially when Eva Landa and Harry Kraus walked past. “They were a very famous couple in our minds, because they really were going together and met often. And Eva was a beauty,” Handa recalls. She can also remember “Eva knitting a cap for Harry, with long braids attached, which was all the rage at the time. And he always wore it, summer and winter—that’s how much he loved her.”

  Eva and Harry had first become acquainted in Prague, at the Jewish School on Jáchymová Street, where both were in the fourth grade during the 1940–41 school year. At first Eva had felt flattered by Harry’s obvious interest in her, but she had not taken his feelings seriously and had definitely not returned his attentions. She was only eleven years old and Harry was the first boy to fall in love with her. He was short and athletic, sometimes very funny and witty, if not as ambitious in school as Eva, who was always among the top students. Since they shared the same route to school, they often met before and after classes and occasionally went for a walk in the Jewish cemetery, one of the few places besides Hagibor that was still open to Jewish children.

  This was a time when children grew up a lot more quickly than nature had intended. The pressure of events broke through the wall that normally separates the adult world from the children’s world. The curiosity, playfulness, and simple joy that usually drew children to one another were now replaced by a shared fear of a world of deprivation and humiliation.

  Eva had been the first to be put on a transport. As Harry said his goodbyes, he pressed a letter in her hand. She was so distraught that she locked herself in the bathroom and wept.

  Nine months later, as Eva looked down from an attic window of the Hamburg Barracks, she spotted Harry among the new arrivals. “I was so excited that I came down with a fever. And our friendship continued. I liked him more and more.”

  Eva has not forgotten those moments. But she did forget the dedication that Harry wrote in her poetry album in Theresienstadt. If her friend Handa had not recalled it, Eva would not know it today, because her album vanished a few months later, when she arrived at Auschwitz. “Life flows like water,” Harry had written, “what a shame to lose a single minute. Your loving Harry.”

  For some of the girls, the evening promenade with their boyfriends was the highlight of the day. This was also true of Ela, who often went to bed with her head whirling and so full of questions that she could not fall aslee
p. What had Honza meant by this or that word? By this or that gesture? Was he really in love with her? A thousand questions, the ones that fill the heads of so many young girls her age. But Helga was in no mood to keep up with her friends in this regard—there were, after all, far more important things going on in the world.

  Monday, September 13, 1943

  Italy has surrendered and abandoned Hitler! Tra la la! He’s all by himself in the stew! Mussolini quarreled with the king and handed the government over to others. Mussolini is in jail!—Learning is so wonderful! I’m in group A. It’s the best group and the equivalent of the third year in gymnasium. We might have Latin, too. Of fifty-seven children, I scored third best on the math test.

  A wave of hope swept over Theresienstadt. Mussolini’s fall from power appeared to foreshadow a quick end to the war. The news “broadcast” via word of mouth sounded more and more promising. The reports spurred a whole series of programs: lectures, concerts, theatrical performances, and cabarets.

  Monday, September 20, 1943

  What a splendid day. I still haven’t recovered. Papa and I attended a play about Franpois Villon—a fifteenth-century French poet. People thought he was a beggar and a bad man. He hated the rich. The text was compiled from selections of his ballads, interspersed with ballet. The scenery was splendidly painted. Villon was played by a mime, but I can’t describe it and know that I didn’t really understand it. It’s a lyrical, yet also political work. It is called The Beggar’s Ballad.