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

by Hannelore Brenner-Wonschick; Hannelore Brenner

  “So I picked my boy up and held him tight, even though that was rather difficult,” Alice Herz-Sommer continues in her report. “And now the moment was here. We are going to be shot. This is the end. Life is over. Yes, and how does a person react in such a situation? One does not react at all. There is no way to react. Your own emotional life is no longer functional. It is more like a dark wall. Everything is black. The only thing I could feel was the warm body of my son. And I told myself, Well, he’s here with me. Whatever happens to me happens to him. And that lies in God’s hand.”14

  As the day drew to a close, people—especially the elderly—began falling to the ground in exhaustion, some of them fainting, others still quite conscious and yet incapable of staying on their feet. Many younger people were barely able to hold out, either, and—without arousing the notice of the police or SS men who were pacing along their ranks and bellowing numbers—they took turns slipping to the back of their groups of one hundred, where they could crouch down and relax their exhausted bodies for a few minutes. Several more hours passed. It was growing dark and still they were being held in check. When would this nightmare end?

  Little Frta, Marta Fröhlich, was ill with bronchitis and in the infirmary in the Hohenelbe Barracks, so she did not have to appear for the census in the kotlina, as was the case with several hundred other patients. Many of them, especially the old and frail, had been brought to the hospital early that morning. The hospital was overcrowded, and there was so little room that even those who were seriously ill not only had to share a cot with others, but many of them could not even stretch out and had to sit up. There they huddled, shoulder to shoulder, the entire day. Including Marta: “Sick as I was, I sat on my cot from morning to night. I couldn’t even go to the toilet. They just kept counting us over and over—like cows. I heard airplanes and I heard shots, and I thought we would all be shot.”

  As the hours passed, her feverish thoughts were with her brothers and sisters in the kotlina. It seemed like an eternity. “What are the Germans up to? If only I could be with my brothers and sisters! If they shoot them, then I want to be shot, too.”

  “And then something happened that I will never forget,” Alice Herz-Sommer recalls. “A loud cry, in Czech: ‘Zpět do ghetta! Back to the ghetto!’ There’s no describing the feeling. The ghetto had become paradise. The ghetto, that indescribable ghetto, that hell—in that moment it became paradise!”

  Zdeněk Ohrenstein, the boy from Prague who had played the dog in Brundibár (and who later went by Ornest, the Czech version of his surname), described these events in an article for Vedem: “A great rush, as if a rope had slackened and everything gave way. People moved forward. No one knew who had given the order, but everyone started to walk. Like a slowly churning—and deadly—avalanche. Pushing and shoving. Loud cries. People ruthlessly trampling each other. Everyone just thinking of himself. Me, nobody else! My life is at stake. We rolled back to the barracks, which then stood in our way. This horde of people became one great mob. You couldn’t breathe, and everything stood still. Each was carried along, scarcely aware even of himself. The strength and force of the individual no longer counted. There was only one awful force, the force of the mob, unstoppable and cruel. Yes, so it was—and yet we managed to get home. No one knows precisely how. Everyone fled, leaving everyone else behind. We escaped like flies from a spider-web, our faces expressing only bafflement.”

  At nine o’clock the girls reached their Home. Flaška had fainted from exhaustion on the way back and had to be carried for a while. But that was harmless in comparison to those who were so old and weak that they did not survive this day of absurd census taking, or who later died from its rigors.

  When the girls got back to “their” Room 28, Strejda (Handa’s father) was already kneeling at the old stove. The fire was burning and spreading comforting warmth. Without a word, the girls took to their beds and fell asleep at once.

  Helga’s father kept a sober record of what happened: “Autumn parade. Census in the Buhošovice Hollow. Evidently a former drill-field. About thirty thousand Jews report for duty. Our building at nine o’clock in the morning. I’ve been on my feet for fourteen hours. I arrived home at a quarter to eight. Helga, who was standing at the other end of the field and held out bravely, arrived at her quarters at nine o’clock. We were let back into the ghetto at half past seven.” His love of puns came through in his summary of the events of the day: “Open-air production on Buhošovice Field: The Tallies of Hoffmann.” Another musical allusion also made the rounds in whispers: Weber’s Freíshit.15

  “The administration and the Council of Elders,” stated Order of the Day #37 on November 13, “thank all those ghetto inmates, especially the staff of the barracks, the Ghetto Guard, the finance office, the doctors and nursing staff, the staff of Central Registry, and those working groups who assisted in both departure and return, for the discipline they displayed while the census was taken in the Buhošovice Hollow on November 11, 1943.”

  It was not until ten days later, on November 21, that Helga retrieved her diary from its hiding place and wrote, “I had to put you aside for a while, at the bottom of my suitcase, because I expected the Germans to do a search. I had to hide all my notebooks, hide you under dead things! Even now I cannot describe what had happened during this time.”

  “We’re expecting some kind of inspection from the outside world,” Helga wrote on November 29, 1943. “Everyone learned about it on the 27th. The entire ghetto is to be prettied up—the store windows, the barracks, and the children’s homes. Shelves have to be hidden behind curtains. Nothing is to be left lying in the open. We’re under quarantine. We’re allowed outside, but no one is allowed to visit us. Encephalitis has broken out, thirty cases, four of them ours.”

  In Room 28 one bunk after the other stood empty, the sick bays were filled to their limit, and the Sokolovna was turned into a hospital for encephalitis cases. An inflammation of the brain, the disease is very infectious and results in both a high fever and narcolepsy, which is why it is also called sleeping sickness. There was hardly a girl who did not come down with it—Ela, Flaška, Handa, Helga, Frta, Marianne, Judith, Lenka, Hana, Hanka, Eva Winkler. One after the other they fell ill—as did the adults, and it was often worse for them than for the children. Tella suddenly could no longer move her fingers; it was as if she were paralyzed, and for a while she was absent from Room 28.

  The disease caused great confusion and undermined the discipline that usually prevailed in the Girls’ Home. Even prohibitions were ignored. Because of the contagious nature of the disease, no one was allowed in the Girls’ Home except the residents, but this did not prevent a few boys from visiting their girlfriends.

  Marianne Deutsch (left) and Hana Brady. Hana lived in another room in the Girls’ Home. The two became friends when they were both confined to the same small sick-bay room. Hana had only her brother Jiři in the ghetto. “She was a very pretty blond girl. I liked her a lot and got along with her wonderfully,” Marianne says. Marianne would have loved to live with Hana in that little room until the end of the war. She didn’t want to return to Room 28.

  “My boyfriend Polda put on girls’ clothes and a fuzzy cap and managed to get all the way up to us on the third floor,” Hanka recalls. Ela’s and Flaška’s boyfriends, Honza and Kurt, also wiggled their way through a hole in the garden fence right next to the compost heap. After a quick exchange of words, the two disappeared again the way they had come.

  “Some of us did everything we could not to be sent to the Sokolovna,” Handa remembers. “When a doctor examined us we would sometimes fake reflexes. The knee reflex was no problem. But it was more difficult if he pricked us in the stomach. But we tried anyway and practiced producing the reflexes they wanted. I know I didn’t want to miss a single performance of Brundibár for anything.”

  It was the same for the others. During this period they had a much better chance of being allowed to step in for one of the leads. Maria, who enjoyed pla
ying the sparrow, much preferred, of course, taking over the role of Aninka, right beside her brother Piňt’a. She had proved herself in the part several times by now, and the girls in Room 28 were proud to have an Aninka in their ranks.

  Everyone loved this pretty girl with the dark eyes and wonderful voice. Maria was three years younger than Rafael Schächter’s first choice for the role, Greta Hofmeister from Room 25, whom, as Flaška puts it, “we younger girls regarded as something of a prima donna. She had a very beautiful, crystal-clear voice, like a bell. But our Maria was more childlike, more natural. For us, she was the real Aninka.”

  Stephan Sommer slipped into the role of the sparrow as often as he could. He was always close at hand, waiting for his chance. The little boy was the darling of the ensemble. “Everybody liked him, hugged and kissed him,” Helga recalls. “He was so charming onstage, hopping about so marvelously, just like a sparrow.”

  By now the children knew every song by heart. It was no problem for Baštík to find stand-ins for any role. Some children were just lying in wait for the chance. Handa was given the role of the dog for one performance during this period, and Flaška even got to play Aninka. “One day both Aninkas, Greta Hofmeister and Maria Mühlstein, were sick,” she vividly recalls. “And I asked Baštík, ‘Please, can I can sing Aninka? I can do it, too.’ And he let me. I sang it without a rehearsal— and didn’t make many mistakes. Only when I was dancing with Piňt’a, he kept stepping on my toes. I did two performances on one day, afternoon and evening. And I was so happy that I could sing the role of Aninka!”

  Alice Herz-Sommer (born 1903) and her son, Stephan (1937–2001), who loved playing the sparrow in Brundibár. In 1949 Stephan adopted the name Raphael. “My boy was enchanted, bewitched by Brundibár, ” Alice recalls. “Whenever he returned from a performance he would sit on the top bunk with a ladle in his hand and conduct, and the other five children (there were six in our room) would sing along, and sometimes we adults sang along, too. The text is simply delightful.”

  Each performance was a special event, a cultural and social high point in the daily monotony of camp life. The story and the music brought all the participants, both boys and girls, closer together. And there were such wonderful scenes! Whenever the little trumpeter played his solo, the children would waltz in time to it. “It always made us laugh,” recalls Ela, who would never miss a show. “He was this little Danish boy—and he played so beautifully!”

  The “Danish boy” was Paul Rabinowitsch, born in Hamburg in 1930. He had emigrated to Denmark with his mother and stepfather, but had been deported to Theresienstadt in October 1943. Since then he had lived in Boys’ Home L 414, where he was the only Dane among a majority of Czech and German boys. He owed his participation in Brundibár to a rare talent—he played the trumpet. And not badly, either. After all, he had already made his debut as a member of the Copenhagen Tivoli Guarde Band.

  And now he was performing in a children’s opera. He sat beside the pianist, the handsome Gideon Klein (or sometimes Baštík himself) and when it was time for his entrance, Paul stood up and played his trumpet with all his heart. “I vividly recall,” he would report decades later, “playing that solo, that lovely Valse lente cantabile, and watching the children dance and laugh. It was fantastic.”

  Paul found other things fantastic as well—things that had greater meaning for him than they did for the other children, because he spoke not a word of Czech. “What was so wonderful for me,” he recalls, “was that the plot was about milk and how the children were able to get milk, and that people stood there buying bonbons and cake and bread. That was incredible! They had cake and bread and milk and ice cream— vanilla, strawberry, and lemon ice cream. Croissants and buns and pretzels, and all the other things they sang about. And all we had, of course, was dry bread! We children hadn’t had real milk to drink for years; no eggs, no cake, no bonbons, no ice cream. And suddenly there was someone selling every sort of ice cream imaginable, as if all these things actually existed. And the children acted as if these things were really there. That was fantastic. Reality was transformed, bewitched. And it was especially Brundibár that had that great creative power.”

  Willy Groag (1914–2001) and his wife, Miriam (1918–1946), whom he married in 1940. Their daughter Chava was born in the ghetto in 1944 and now lives in Israel.

  Sometimes when the new Home administrator Willy Groag made his evening rounds, someone would mention Brundibár, and he would treat the children to a special story— and Groag was a wonderful storyteller. He told the children how when he was a chemistry student in Prague between 1934 and 1936 he would pay his weekly visit—as a “boarder,” as he liked to put it—to his uncle Heinz, Dr. Heinrich Fleischmann, a lawyer and bachelor who lived on Karlsplatz. “My uncle played the piano very well. He was an amateur of the highest level. And he played piano together with Hans Krása. Sometimes they would go to a coffeehouse together, the Deutsches Haus on Na Prikope, which was frequented by the good liberal left—many of them writers for the Prager Tageblatt, such as Rudolf Thomas, Ludwig Steiner, Max Brod, Egon Erwin Kisch, Anton Kuh, and Theodor Lessing.”

  It was from Groag that the girls learned many interesting details about the life of Brundibár’s composer, who was born on November 30, 1899, the son of a Prague attorney. They learned about his successful debut on May 4, 1921, when Alexander Zemlinsky, the conductor of the New German Theater in Prague, performed his first work, Orchestral Songs, with texts taken from Christian Morgenstern’s Gallows Songs. Groag told them about Krása’s years in Paris, where he studied with Albert Roussell and where in 1923 he heard Roussell’s Symphony for Small Orchestra and his String Quartet performed. And most certainly he also told them about Krása’s greatest success, a musical rendition of Dostoyevsky’s novella Uncle’s Dream, which premiered under the title Betrothal in a Dream at the New German Theater in Prague in 1933 and for which Krása received that year’s Czech National Prize.

  “But you’re barking up the wrong tree if you believe I would ever have thought that someday he would compose such a magical children’s opera,” Groag would conclude his special account of the life of Hans Krása. “You see, in those days, Krása seemed to me to be a rather odd bachelor, slightly introverted, at least in his dealings with me. But that may have been due to the difference in age. In any case, I was only twenty, and he was of my uncle’s generation. But I remember him as a odd fellow, dressed in a rather old-fashioned frockcoat with tails that stuck out, but with an artist’s lovely head of curly hair.”

  Hanukkah, the festival of lights and of hope, was drawing near. The children in the Homes set about preparing their gifts. This meant a great deal of craftwork and organizing. Helga had a Theresienstadt coat of arms made for her father, for which she paid five hundred fifty ghetto kronas, nineteen ounces of sugar, and two ounces of margarine—all of it saved up through an iron will. And although their friendship was falling apart, she wanted to give Ela a pendant. “It’s all over with Ela. We’ve told each other that we aren’t a good match. Nevertheless, I intend to treat Ela cordially, so she won’t have a bad opinion of me. And I want her to have a memento from me, since I have one from her,” she wrote in her diary.

  Pendants and brooches were the two presents most girls could give each other. With a little skill, they could even make them themselves. As we learn from her notebook, Handa was planning the same sort of presents: she wanted to give Muška a brooch in the form of a dog. For Helga it was to be one with a horse’s head, for Ela one with a cat’s head, and a treble clef for Piňt’a Mühlstein.

  But during this time their thoughts were also revolving around Hana Epstein—“Holubička.” What had become of her? She had disappeared from their room a while ago. No one knew what had really happened to her. Some said she was in the Cavalier Barracks, among the mentally ill. But why? Something was not quite right with Holubička, they all knew that. She was slightly handicapped and a bed-wetter; she lisped and seemed naive. She usually had a smile
on her face—even when the girls made fun of her, something she never seemed to really notice.

  The girls missed Holubička, and Ela and Marta decided to try to find her. They set out for the Cavalier Barracks.

  “As we were crossing the courtyard of the Cavalier Barracks, we suddenly heard someone shout, ‘Elinka, Elinka,’ ” Ela recalls. “We looked around, and there among the other sad creatures, we saw an utterly gaunt, disheveled woman dressed only in her underpants. She stared at me distractedly and frantically waved her hands. I was close to panicking. Did this woman really know me?”

  “Elinka, Elinka,” she cried again as the girls walked on. Suddenly Ela recognized her voice—this woman was from her hometown of Lom. She had once been elegant and well-to-do, a hatmaker who had later lived on Na Prikope in Prague. Now she had ended up in the Theresienstadt madhouse. Just like Hana Epstein.

  Ela and Marta finally found Holubička in a room locked to visitors. They could only peek at her through a large window. There she lay, side by side with other patients. She was in a straitjacket, staring into space, inert and apathetic. “She didn’t recognize us. It was terrible. We felt so dreadfully sorry for her.”

  Transports! The news struck like a thunderbolt. “Transports! That terrible word brought Theresienstadt into a state of shock,” Helga wrote in her diary on December 13. “Two transports of 2,500 people each will be leaving. The only people ineligible are those with infectious diseases. Four of us will be leaving: Irena Grünfeld and Eva Landa. Fiška and Milka are on the reserve list. But even though they’re reserves and not on the first transport, they’re sure to be leaving on the second. Papa and I are protected. The rumor making the rounds is that all Jews from the Protectorate are being sent to Birkenau.”