Then came the assassination of Heydrich in May 1942 and the Nazis’ bloody reprisals, which filled the Czechs with fear and horror. On June 4, as part of their revenge for Heydrich’s death, the Nazis ordered ten large transports in one fell swoop. The Landa family was on that list.
At six o’clock on the morning of June 28, 1942, they arrived with the prescribed hundred pounds of baggage at the Messepalais, the assembly point for Jews. On the morning of July 2, their journey continued in the direction of Theresienstadt.
It was a lovely summer day when they arrived. Many of the ghetto’s inmates stood outside on the street, eyeing them with curiosity. Suddenly Eva recognized a former neighbor. “It was Herr Reiser. He was very thin and pale. He had a black ribbon on his sleeve, a symbol of mourning. My mother pointed to his sleeve, asking what it meant. He made a sign with his hand, and we understood right away: His little daughter Eva, age seven, had died of the measles. I had often played with Eva. The family had come from the Sudetenland and had been living with my grandparents. We had given the girl clothing, and supported the whole family. I was devastated—and afraid. I said to myself that day: I will do whatever I must to stay alive.”
Marta Fröhlich
Marta Fröhlich came from an impoverished family in the southern Bohemian town of Písek, where she was born on July 17, 1928. Her father, Leopold Fröhlich, was Jewish; her mother, Barbora Fröhlich, née Skřivanová, was a Christian. Marta loved her mother. “She was very tidy and very hardworking, had a good heart, and was kind to everyone. She sewed us coats, shirts, and blouses, although she was no seamstress. But she knew how to help out with all kinds of work.”
Barbora Fröhlich did not have much of a choice. Her husband was hardly a pillar of strength for the family. He was often ill, always hot-tempered, and had a tendency to tyrannize his family. This was also the reason why, with the help of better-situated relatives, the children were sent to Prague as soon as they reached school age—the boys to the orphanage on Belgicka and the girls to the one on Hybernska. Despite their poverty, they were to get a good education. Marta was enrolled in the Jewish grammar school on Masna Street.
Marta and her siblings soon felt at home in the Old City of Prague—until the day in March 1939 when the Germans marched into the city. “They sent us back to the orphanage from school. I can still see the huge crowds standing along the streets. Many people were crying. From that day on everything changed. Soon we weren’t allowed to go to school anymore, Jewish institutions were closed one after the other, and we finally ended up in an overcrowded old people’s home in Strašnice next to Hagibor, the Jewish athletic field.” In one of the buildings in the complex, Brundibár, which had premiered in the dining room of the orphanage on Belgicka, started up again, and Marta and her sister Zdenka sang in the schoolchildren’s choir. Shortly thereafter, when the inmates of the old people’s home had been deported and the doors were locked, the remaining Jewish boys and girls were resettled in the Belgicka orphanage, and the five Fröhlich children were all under one roof again.
Then came the day in January when they were taken away by the Gestapo. That same night, after having spent hours in a cold cellar, the Gestapo put them into a police van along with three other prisoners— a woman with two children. Guarded by six policemen, they arrived at Theresienstadt. It was February 1943.
Eva Winkler
Eva Winkler was born in Brno on October 12, 1930, the daughter of Fritz and Edith Winkler, née Rosenblatt. She spent her childhood in Miroslav, a little village in southern Moravia, where her parents owned a sawmill.
When Hitler’s troops marched into the Sudetenland in October 1938, the family left everything behind and fled by night to Brno, where Eva’s grandparents Adolf and Wilma Rosenblatt lived. They also owned a sawmill with extensive grounds and quarters for workers. The family took refuge in one of these buildings, and Eva soon got over the shock of their sudden flight. Eva liked her new surroundings. She admired her grandmother, “a generous and elegant lady. Actually, it was very fancy there, quite special, and it made a huge impression on me.”
Life seemed to return to its normal course, and while she attended school or played with her cousin Bed’a, her father spent his time in a little workshop making stack upon stack of crates for the many people who hoped to emigrate or flee the country. The demand for them kept growing.
The Winklers were also thinking of leaving. They were weighing the idea of Montevideo, and also of putting Eva on a children’s transport to England. But these plans came to naught, in large part because their sawmill in Miroslav had been Aryanized and all their assets confiscated.
In March 1939, when the Germans occupied Brno and the rest of the Czech lands, everything was as it had been in Miroslav. Eva’s grandparents’ sawmill and assets were seized. Close neighbors turned out to be vicious Nazis, and even the supervisor in their building suddenly showed up in a brown shirt. “We were afraid of these people.”
Eva and her family moved a total of four times, until finally they were living in one room of a small apartment, which they had to share with other families. It was there that she often got together with a friend she had made in Brno—Flaška. There was still some space for children to play in Flaška’s apartment at Adler Gasse 13, and they made use of it as often as possible.
Then the transports began. The eleven thousand Jews of Brno were summoned in alphabetical order. Flaška was on one of the very first lists. By April 1942, it was the letter W’s turn, and the Winkler family began the journey early on a cool Sunday morning.
“Why a Sunday? Why so early in the morning?” Eva asks, when describing that day years later. “Because most people were still asleep at that hour. Because there was no one on the street, no one to see us moving through the streets loaded with our backpacks, on the long walk to the Brno school that served as the assembly point. Only the SS guards watched us closely, some of them young fellows who mocked and laughed at us. And my father said to them, and I can still hear him even today, ‘Just wait. One day those grins will be wiped right off your faces.’ ”
CHAPTER SIX
Appearance and Reality
December 21, 1943, was the day on which Hanukkah actually fell, but no one was in the mood to celebrate. And yet who would want the flame of hope to go out? After all, Hanukkah is the festival of hope. It commemorates the uprising in 165 B.C.E. in the Land of Israel of the Maccabees against the occupying Syrian Greeks, and the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem (Hanukkah is Hebrew for “dedication”) following its desecration by the occupiers. Just enough purified oil was left to light the menorah, the Temple’s candelabra, for one day. But a miracle occurred: The menorah burned for eight days, during which time new oil could be produced, and the flame was kept alive.
As 1943 drew to a close, the question of whether there could still be miracles was often asked in Theresienstadt. Most everyone believed that there could be. What would be the point of maintaining the opposite? But there were also some pessimists among the girls. The following verse can be found in Handa’s notebook:
Pessimists live by one rule—
The optimist’s mood must be spoiled.
But the optimists smile and wonder instead:
Might it be true? Might it yet happen?
The scowling pessimists reverse the case
And laugh in every optimistic face.
Otto Pollak was an optimist; there was no doubt about it. Before an assembly gathered to celebrate Hanukkah at the Home for Invalids he read from a collection of poems titled Songs of the Ghetto by Maurice Rosenfeld. Helga, he reports in his own calendar diary, “listened wide-eyed.”
“I am really proud of Papa,” Helga wrote that same evening. “I just heard him read poems aloud for the first time—and so beautifully! It was at the Hanukkah celebration at the Home for Invalids, which lasted until nine o’clock. I couldn’t stay past eight-thirty. Papa read three very beautiful Jewish poems with such liveliness—Papa is a treasure. Not bec
ause I received gifts from him—a little notebook with a picture of a menorah on the front and a velvet cover for my diary—but because Papa has reminded me that it is Hanukkah, even here in Theresienstadt.”
Three days later Helga was lying in sick bay with encephalitis; the old year passed into the new without any fanfare. On January 5, Helga, along with Hana Lissau and Ruth Gutmann, was transferred to the Sokolovna, the former clubhouse of the Sokol Athletic Club. It was a very busy place.
Wednesday, January 5, 1944
Today is my first day in the Sokolovna. I have encephalitis, or sleeping sickness, a kind of brain flu. I’ve been sick for ten days now and spent the whole time in sick bay. There are so many cases that one of the rooms in the Home had to be cleared to accommodate them. It was really awful there. The door wouldn’t close, the windows were broken, the blinds ripped, the stove wouldn’t heat, and there was a thick layer of dust everywhere. No one looked after us because it wasn’t a real sick bay. It was just so that we could be isolated from the healthy children. I am so happy to be here now.
The Sokolovna, which before the war had been the clubhouse of the Sokol (Czech for “falcon”) Athletic Club
Thursday, January 6, 1944
The Sokolovna is a beautiful, modern building full of laboratories. The former gym is now the sick bay for all encephalitis cases. There are four rows of beds, with twenty patients in each row. Each row has its own doctor. One doctor and one nurse are on duty at night. There are five or six nurses during the day. When Pfeiffer, the head doctor, makes his rounds, he’s joined by four other doctors and all the nurses.
They wake us at six o’clock and take temperatures. At nine the doctor in charge makes his rounds, and at eleven the head doctor makes his. This afternoon Prof. Sittig, a nerve specialist, came to examine the new patients. We new arrivals are lying just outside the ward in a separate room with only nine beds.
We are all in love with Dr. Herling, the physician assigned to us, but it’s hopeless because he’s already married. He’s so handsome and dashing. He has a very special smile, probably because he knows we all have a crush on him.
During visiting hours today we were allowed out on the balcony and I spoke to Papa from the second floor.
The next day Helga passed a little note to her father—let down from the terrace at the end of long thread. No visitors were allowed inside the Sokolovna, so there was always a crowd outside the building during visiting hours. Naturally, there was a loud muddle of voices, and it would have been impossible for Helga to shout everything she wanted to say to her father.
The note that Helga let down to her father on a thread from the terrace of the Sokolovna
January 6, 1944
Dear Papa,
We’re finally here. It’s nice here and the main thing is: it’s CLEAN here. The girls who were already in the Sokolovna were so happy to see us—it’s a miracle that they didn’t hug us to death. We had to bathe and wash our hair. There was a concert in the evening. Someone played the violin and someone else an accordion. They played Dvořák’s Humoresque, Poem by Fibich, a medley of songs from the operetta Gypsy Princess, plus some Czech folk songs. They ended the concert with Gounod’s Ave Maria.
Nine o’clock is lights-out. My blanket is so heavy that I thought I’d end up flat as a pancake by morning.
I’m lying next to Ruth Gutmann. She’s a great girl from our room. I had already laid beside her in 17a [the sick bay at the Girls’ Home]. We’ve become fond of each other since that time. Please, write me, I’m a little afraid here. I’m reading a book in German now: The Jewish Millionaires.
When I look out the window I can see the Sudeten Barracks and a barbed wire fence. It looks as if I’m right at the border. Everything is covered with snow, and I can see forests and mountains in the distance. There’s a guardhouse and a policeman stationed at the fence.
When Hana Lissau was discharged on January 10, Helga moved to the vacant bed beside Eva Heller. Eva also came from Vienna and, like Helga, had been taken in 1938 to Czechoslovakia, where she lived with her aunt in Brno until her deportation. Her parents had fled to Palestine and, like Zajíček’s parents, they had hoped to have their daughter follow later. But it hadn’t worked out, and Eva remained with her aunt, who treated her like her own daughter.
A deep friendship developed between Helga and Eva Heller. The two of them founded a “commune,” shared their food and anything they got, and occasionally buried themselves in the books that were passed around the Sokolovna: Quo Vadis, The Microbe Hunters, and Pierrot, Francis Kozik’s biography of the French mime Caspar Debureau. Sometimes they did handicrafts with the help of a girl in a nearby bed, making little dolls out of rags, wire, and yarn. Helga gave her first creation to her father. “In case you don’t recognize it, he’s supposed to be a sailor, and that’s an accordion he’s holding.” For her cousin Lea she put together a snowman, and for Trude a girl in winter clothing, in a dark blue dress with a muff, a cap, and a scarf.
And so the days passed with naps, chatting, reading, handicrafts, and visits by the doctors. The fears and anxieties that sometimes faded away during the day hit doubly hard at night: “Every day the actress tells me what I did in my sleep; that she tucked me in like a little child and that I scream a lot. Today I was lying with my head on Eva’s stomach, and she woke up because she couldn’t breathe. What’s the political news? Write and tell me. I would so love to see Mama even for just a little while.”
Illness still held Helga in its clutches. “I have a real encephalitis head. I forget everything. I go to the bathroom and suddenly realize I don’t know why I went there. It is so bad that when I write to you and put my pencil aside for a second, I fall asleep at once. I hope that I can come home in a week or two. I couldn’t write to Mařenka yesterday because my eyes hurt too much.”
January was drawing to a close, and there was still a blanket of snow when Helga was finally released. “Left Marta at three-thirty to see Mimi,” Otto Pollak noted. “A marvelous surprise when I got to House L 410—Helga came shooting out the door. She’s been released from the Sokolovna. She wanted to surprise me by playing her little trick. When I visited her yesterday she said the doctors were figuring it would be two weeks yet before the infection was gone. With a cry of Tati! she hugged me and smothered me with kisses.”
February 20, 1944, was, as Otto Pollak recorded enthusiastically in his diary, “the most beautiful winter day of the year. No fog, no clouds, an azure sky, cold, but with a wonderfully bright winter sun, and with freshly fallen snow thawing on Monte Terezino.”1 News from the front indicated that the Germans were suffering huge losses on a daily basis. At the start of the month, according to the bonkes making the rounds of the ghetto, fifty-four hundred airplanes were involved in a maneuver in North Africa, and the roar could be heard all across the south of France. “They were American and English planes,” Helga confided to her diary in code, reversing all the letters of the sentence.
In the meantime, a new girl, Miriam Rosenzweig, had moved into Room 28. She shared a bunk with Hanka Wertheimer. The two had become acquainted in the Dresden Barracks, where Hanka’s grandmother and Miriam’s mother shared a room. Hanka liked this blond girl who was, like herself, a member of the Zionist organization Tekhelet-Lavan. Their pleasure in spending time together quickly grew into a friendship that was deepened at the meetings of Hanka’s little Zionist group, Dror, which Miriam also joined.
Miriam had long been familiar with Room 28. She had regularly attended Friedl Dicker-Brandeis’s painting classes there. And she also loved to join in the girls’ other activities, because there was usually something interesting going on in Room 28. The latest rage was scouting.
By this time a group of girls had joined with the boys in Room 9 to form a scouting troop. Inspired by The Boys from Beavers’ River, a book by Jaroslav Foglar, they called themselves the Beavers. The Beavers were divided into teams: the Wolves, the Sharpshooters, the Foxes, and the Lions, each with its own flag
and battle cry. “With lionlike strength we pounce like the king of beasts. Forward, young Lions, forward, ahoy, ahoy!” was the cry of the Lions, the group that Helga had halfheartedly joined. “At first I didn’t want to join the scouts,” she noted, “because I know how it always turns out when our girls do anything together with these guys. Many of them don’t take the whole thing seriously—they just want to be around the boys. But then I reconsidered and joined the group, because I do love nature.”
When Helga heard that a couple of the girls intended to organize parties with the boys, though, she regretted her decision. “Yuck! Dancing, body against body. The smell of sweat and makeup. I’m against it. This isn’t allowed according to scouting rules.”
Judith Schwarzbart was in total agreement with her. Weren’t there enough scouting activities—like not speaking for a day, or not eating all day, or not laughing, even when others did everything they could to make you laugh? What was all this to-do about boys? Some girls were now also suggesting ideas for future parties: a sketch, a game, something amusing. Had their comrades gone completely crazy?
Others saw the funny side of the matter. Handa and Fiška used this opportunity to write what they called an “ironic song.” It can be found in Handa’s notebook:
The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope, and Survival in Theresienstadt Page 21
