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

by Hannelore Brenner-Wonschick; Hannelore Brenner

  One day Gelbec [Honza Gelbkopf] came to us and said: “I’m supposed to tell you that our scout troop will be meeting this afternoon.” He was hardly out the door when everyone began shouting, “Hurrah! There’ll be lots of boys there!” Lenka: “Which blouse should I wear? This one’s all wrinkled, and my best skirt has a big spot on it.” “So what?” one of the girls said. “Why are you always going on about your blouse!” “Lenka, calm down. It’s not important.” Lenka: “But I’ve got to look good because my boyfriend will see me there.” Another girl: “You’re so silly. Gelbec isn’t even your boyfriend anymore. So don’t try that on us, and stop worrying about your outfit all the time.”

  The next day the stillness of Home 9 was broken by a deep sigh. “Who would like to exchange 2 ounces of margarine for Ela? She jabbers so much I don’t even like her anymore.” And one of the boys says, “You don’t think I’m crazy, do you? I can eat margarine. But what can I do with Ela?”

  Suddenly Chamičurgl’s bald head comes into view. And he raises one finger and says menacingly, “Gelbec, I’m warning you. You stick with Ela, or I’ll make mincemeat of you.”

  Although Judith and Helga both loved to laugh and were amused by such foolishness, they could not make heads or tails of the excitement this partnership with the boys in Home 9 was occasioning among their roommates. “For all I care this scouting thing can fall apart. It’s really just silly stuff with boys, and it has no deeper meaning at all,” Helga told her diary. “Ma’agal full speed ahead would be better.” Or education. “I’ve been unfaithful to you, haven’t I?” reads her entry for February 24. “But I really haven’t had any time to write. I have so much to learn if I want to stay in group A. I was second in geography with a grade of 95, and in history I had a 100, and Hana Lissau and I are the best in the class. We have a new teacher in Czech, a regular Xanthippe. She taught the eighth grade. Things are getting lost here. Tella is carrying out a search to find out why.”

  Something quite shocking was happening in Room 28. Bread, margarine, sugar, and even buns and dumplings kept disappearing somewhere along the way from the children’s kitchen to the Home. “I’ll never forget that moment,” little Frta, Marta Fröhlich, recalls. “I was a suspect! And then two more buns disappeared, and two girls would have to go without lunch. They searched everywhere and took my bunk apart, but didn’t find anything. Then the counselors came up with a plan. Before our meal all the girls had to go down to the courtyard, and a counselor hid behind the curtain of our closet. The counselor who accompanied the girls getting the food placed the bucket in view of the hidden counselor. We were called in for our meal. And two buns were missing again. ‘That just isn’t possible!’ I can still hear it today. And suddenly a girl pointed at me and said, ‘She’s blushing. It’s probably her.’ I started to cry. It was horrible. It wasn’t me, and it was such an awful feeling. It weighed on me for a long, long time, even after the war. The counselors insisted that the thief confess and admit what she had done. But no one stepped forward. Since two portions for our noon meal were missing again, there was an inspection. They searched everywhere now, in our blankets, which we always kept rolled up, and what do you know—two buns appeared! They were not in my things, but no one apologized to me. They probably thought it didn’t matter if you make life difficult for such a stupid girl.”

  The story about the pilfering cut Marta to the quick. Had it not been for Eva Eckstein, their new counselor, she would have had a hard time getting over it. But Eva kindly took her under her wing. She sensed that Marta was not held in high regard by Tella, and she didn’t want to make her life any more difficult than it already was. She herself had reservations about Tella. “I always had the feeling that whatever I did wasn’t enough. She also pointed out to me that Eva Weiss did everything better than I did.”

  Eva Eckstein was born in Louny on November 7, 1924. She arrived in Theresienstadt in February 1942 and began working on the cleaning crew. Then, during the hard winter of 1942–43, she was assigned to a commando in the forests of Křivoklát. After Eichmann’s visit to Theresienstadt in April 1943, tents were set up in Market Square as a place to assemble crates for the army, and Eva was assigned to this “essential war production.” In the wake of the transports of December 1943 and with the help of her friend Kamilla Rosenbaum, she was transferred to work in Youth Welfare.

  Eva Eckstein was nineteen and more emotionally connected to the girls than Tella. She treated her wards with great kindness, especially Marta, whom she often took along when she visited her mother and two sisters. Marta had finally found someone who offered her trust and maternal affection, and who helped restore her self-confidence. Eva did her best to make life easier for the children. “The time I spent in Room 28,” she would say half a century later, “was the best part of my stay in Theresienstadt.”

  By March the blue skies of February had long since yielded to Theresienstadt’s typical gray weather and low-hanging clouds. Showers alternated with snow flurries, and no change seemed to be in sight. But life went steadily on. “It seems almost incredible to me,” Helga wrote on March 18, 1944, “that in only one month and twenty-eight days I will be fourteen. I was talking with Papa yesterday and I asked him what he would have given me on my birthday in peacetime. He said that if he had the money, he would give me a globe, a microscope, and lots of books. It made me so happy that he had guessed what I wanted.”

  On April 3 she wrote: “The finest time in Theresienstadt is when I can debate with Papa. I learn so much. Yesterday Papa read me a few paragraphs from Schopenhauer; he’s in favor of everyone keeping a diary. It makes me so happy that I can write to a good friend who will never desert me if I don’t want it. At first almost all the girls kept a diary. Now it’s only two or three.”

  By mid-April, Helga found that she had lost her appetite and her stomach was aching—symptoms of jaundice. She was put back into sick bay. Her spirits plummeted. “Any idiot can see that this weather just won’t end,” she said during a visit to her father, who recorded her words in his own diary. “The sun is moving away from the earth.”

  Life in the ghetto seemed to be improving. “Assembly this evening at eight o’clock about the new mail regulations. Permission to write every six weeks. All packages allowed except for tea, coffee, tobacco, cigarettes, and money, which are forbidden. In the future packages will be passed on in the presence of the receiver,” Otto Pollak noted on February 6. And one month later: “Cancellation of the rule that we must greet anyone in uniform.”

  March 6 to March 12 was spring-cleaning week. “Our Invalids’ Home won a prize,” Otto wrote. “My share was two pounds of bread, half a tin of liverwurst, three ounces of margarine, and three ounces of sugar.” At six o’clock on the evening of March 11 he visited the coffeehouse: “Orchestra concert, sixteen musicians, with Professor Carlo S. Taube. They played selections from Mozart’s Magic Flute, Fantasia from Schubert’s sketchbook, Kreisler’s Praeludium and Allegro, a solo by Fröhlich, Dvořák’s Fourth, two Slavic dances.”

  Change was in the air in Theresienstadt: “There is to be a new central medical library with a large reading room,” Dr. Munk, the head of the health department, wrote on March 13, 1944, in a letter he sent to Jakob Edelstein on the assumption that Edelstein was in good health in Auschwitz-Birkenau. “The building that adjoins the Infants’ Home is being added onto it; on the block set aside for small children a toddlers’ nursery is being built in the movie hall, and the wooden barracks have become the living quarters for working women. The park on Market Square is making great progress, and within a few weeks there will be a fountain in the middle of a large flower bed. According to the plans, a music pavilion to be located opposite the coffeehouse seems to be very promising.”2

  The coffeehouse was one of the first additions meant to turn Theresienstadt into the Potemkin village that the Nazis were about to build. Opened in December 1942, it marked the beginning of musical activities that were officially permitted and encouraged by the S
S. At first it was Carlo S. Taube and the Ledeč Orchestra who usually played there along with the Weiss Jazz Quintet, which was directed by Fritz Weiss and featured musicians Pavel Libensky, Wolfi Lederer, Coco Schumann, and Franta Goldschmidt. As time went on, and as more musical instruments arrived in the ghetto and concerts were now performed on the explicit orders of the SS, additional ensembles were formed. In the winter of 1942–43, Karel Fröhlich, Heini Taussig, Romouald Süssmann, and Freddy Mark formed a string quartet, which initially performed with the world-famous Viennese cellist Luzian Horwitz.

  Once the second floor of the coffeehouse was opened for concerts, a group calling itself the Ghetto Swingers had great success with their first revue, titled “Children Not Admitted.” This orchestra, whose membership constantly grew and changed, played in the style of an American swing band—even though jazz was forbidden within the Third Reich—and was instantly the most popular ensemble in Theresienstadt.

  Entrance tickets to the coffeehouse

  Upon closer inspection, the coffeehouse did not offer what its name promised; it was anything but a warm, pleasant spot to enjoy swing music and a selection of delicious cakes and good coffee. First, you had to have an entrance pass, which you might be issued once or at most twice a year, and which designated the date and duration of your visit. “Authorization for a visit to the coffeehouse from noon to 2:00 P.M., ground floor,” it might read. You could spend a maximum of two hours there over a cup of ersatz coffee. “But,” as Thomas Mandl, who at age sixteen was a talented enough violinist to be a member of the coffee-house orchestra, said, “the good thing was that this cup of ersatz coffee was sweetened with a teaspoon of real sugar. And as a musician in the coffeehouse I was permitted one cup of coffee per shift. Usually I saved up my coffee rations from three shifts and then on my fourth shift had them give me a cup with four teaspoons of sugar. And that, of course, was an incredible way to fight off hunger.”

  Visitors, however, had to make do with just one cup of ersatz coffee and one teaspoon of sugar—definitely not enough to combat the agony of hunger. At best they managed to forget it for a while, thanks to lovely music by Lehár, Waldteufel, Béla Kéler, Johann Strauss, or, when Busoni’s brilliant pupil Carlo S. Taube was directing, challenging arrangements by Ravel and Saint-Saëns.

  The coffeehouse was reserved for adults and was essentially off-limits to the girls of Room 28. But the music often found its way up to them, for it came from Q 418 on “Neue Gasse,” as it was now called, a building that stood kitty-corner to the Girls’ Home. From their windows the girls could watch people coming and going, although they could not observe what was happening inside.

  But other unusual changes in the ghetto were not hidden from view. “The barricades are being taken down on Arische Strasse, the barbed wire fence is being removed from the main square,” Otto Pollak noted on April 1. And two days later: “Daylight saving time begins tomorrow. Evening curfew has been extended until nine o’clock.”

  Sometime during the night of April 11, one of the writers for Vedem sneaked into the “brain of the Theresienstadt rumor mill.” Using the pseudonym Syndikus, he reported his discoveries as follows: “The first thing I learned was that our Father [Karl Rahm] intends to issue an order, the gist of which is that all work squads will be forced to send their youngest personnel to do so-called maintenance work. To assure the rapid reconstruction of our town, it was our Father’s wish that specialists of all kinds should participate to the fullest extent. For this purpose Father Bedřich had the gymnasium, which had been turned into a hospital, cleared to have it converted into a synagogue, theater, and future cinema. According to the latest news, which I obtained just a few hours before writing this, an open-air café is to be established on the roof of the gymnasium. He had the barbed wire fence on the square removed and the square transformed into a park, where he had a music pavilion erected to give the inhabitants of Terezín an opportunity for entertainment and refreshment during their lunch hour and in the evening after work.”3

  Sure enough, between noon and one o’clock on April 13, a bright and sunny day, the town orchestra began to play for the first time under the alternating direction of Carlo S. Taube, Peter Deutsch, and Karel Ančerl. It was scheduled to play on Market Square daily, if the weather was good, between eight and nine in the evening, an innovation that gave Syndikus cause for further speculation: “It is said that a restaurant is also going to be built beside the garden on the town square. The bill of fare has not yet been decided. Our town council has also ordered a fleet of hackney cabs for our international spa. The working people of Theresienstadt will also be provided for. There is to be a trolley line laid to make it easier for them to get to and from work.”

  Theresienstadt was well on its way to being turned into a sham show-piece, very much in the style of the village of facades that Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin had quickly assembled to deceive Catherine the Great on her 1787 trip to inspect the south of Russia and observe the prosperity of the Crimea. Great swindles need just a little paint and a few false labels. The banal premise of this Nazi propaganda campaign in Theresienstadt—it’s not the contents but the packaging that count—had as its sole purpose deceiving the world as to the true goals of the Nazi regime.

  And so as of April 15, the daily decrees were now published, nicely illustrated, as Communications from the Jewish Self-Administration. The camp high command was renamed the SS Service Office, and the commandant became the head of the SS Service Office. The Jewish elder was transformed into the mayor, and the ghetto court was now the community court. The guards posted outside the barracks were no longer ghetto guards but community guards. And there were no longer any deportation trains leaving Theresienstadt, but workers’ deployment transports. After all, Theresienstadt was not a concentration camp or a transit camp or a ghetto, but a Jewish settlement area—the “town that the Führer gave the Jews.”

  There was even a contest—“Who Can Come Up with the Best Name?”—that was announced in the Communications from the Jewish Self-Administration for April 23. “The following streets and squares are to be renamed: Rampart III, the lane around the former sheep barn behind Haupt Strasse 2, the lane behind the building at Wall Strasse 8 … There are eight prizes in all: first prize, two tins of sardines in oil and a loaf of bread.”

  The opening of the community center at the Sokolovna, on 3 West Gasse, was celebrated on April 30, 1944, in the presence of the Council of Elders, the heads of all camp departments, and work brigades appointed by the town’s administration. As the chronicler of the town’s musical events, Viktor Ullmann, wrote, “To the delight of music lovers there was an ensemble composed of Messrs. Taussig, Kling, Süssmann, Mark, and Paul Kohn, joined by Karel Ančerl for the performance of a Brahms sextet, which deserves special praise for its precision, clarity, beauty of tone, and unity of style.”4

  “Beautification” was the new slogan that turned all of Theresienstadt upside down and marked the implementation of a critical new phase that began with the introduction of camp commandant Karl Rahm, who arrived on February 8, 1944, as the replacement for Anton Burger. Born in Austria and trained as an auto mechanic, Rahm had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1934, had worked closely with Eichmann in the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna and Prague, and was very well prepared for his assignment, which Adolf Eichmann summed up succinctly at his trial in Israel as one of turning the ghetto of Theresienstadt into “a billboard for the outside world. He [Himmler] evidently wanted to have some evidence on hand, so that when special delegations from abroad addressed him on the issue of the murder of Jews and so forth, he could say, ‘That’s not true; go have a look at Theresienstadt.’ ”5

  While the ghetto was undergoing these strange changes, the prisoners in it were increasingly gripped by mistrust, fear, and sadness. Where had their friends gone? Where were they now? How were they doing—Pavla, Zdenka, Olile, Poppinka, Holubička, Milka, Helena, Irena, Eva Weiss, and Eva Landa? Those were t
he questions the girls in Room 28 kept asking over and over. No postcards had arrived, no signs of life that might have eased their fears. “Eva, why did you leave?” Lenka Lindt wrote on a slip of paper on March 26, 1944. She missed her friend Eva Landa very much.

  Watched over by their guards, the prisoners prepare for the visit of the Red Cross Delegation. Drawing by Alfred Kantor

  Eva, Eva, why did you leave?

  Why have you left an open wound behind?

  Why did you leave

  For a land so far away?

  Lenka, are you angry with me?

  What could I have done?

  I had to go away

  I could not defeat the Germans.

  I’m not angry with you, Eva. I do understand.

  I know that if you could

  You would fulfill my wishes.

  You know, don’t you, Evička

  That all will be well after the war

  And we will never leave one another.

  After the war we shall meet again

  And renew our friendship.

  Eva Landa had been deported to Auschwitz along with her mother, father, and friend Harry Kraus on December 15, 1943. “The ‘trip’ was horrible,” she would report decades later.

  We rode in a cattle car for about three days. In each sealed car were fifty people and their baggage. There was one small barred window. We couldn’t lie down; there wasn’t enough room. Some people died on the way. At one point I began to wail terribly. It was a genuine case of hysterics. They asked me what was the matter. And I said that we’d been traveling for so long and so far and that we would never come back. I had a premonition.