The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope, and Survival in Theresienstadt
Page 24
Tears. Hugs. Words of comfort—imparting brave or forlorn serenity in the face of an inescapable fate. And some final gift for a comrade— a slice of bread, a piece of gingerbread from a recent package, a warm sweater. Those “departing” needed to know that they were all still bound together.
It was almost impossible to sleep. Everyone was depressed, even Marianne Deutsch, although she had an unusual reason. She felt almost a little envious that she “ wasn’t allowed to go,” that she could not get away from Theresienstadt, which she detested, from the involuntary community of Room 28, where she did not feel at all at home. Wherever they were going, it couldn’t be worse than here, she thought. “I was naïve, a child,” she would say later. “I didn’t know what those transports to the East really meant.”
Handa, by contrast, was filled with deep forebodings, as a poem in her notebook reveals:
I walk down the stairs
Alone, lost in my thoughts
Outside peace and quiet reign
The quiet of the night
That I so love
The moon rises
Shining through the fog
Stands there, alone
Like an eye that’s weeping
The cross on the church
Shimmers silver
Here and there a ray of light
Pierces a window
I keep on walking
Down the stairs
The moon emerges from the fog
Adorned with a wreath of tears
Every puddle sparkles like a star
I keep on walking
Lost in my thoughts
I watch as the wind
Brushes through the trees
As the town sleeps
As everything sleeps
I keep on walking
Lost in my thoughts.
The light behind the windows
Has gone out
My eye is lost in the fog
Of the beauty that surrounds me
My thoughts
Twist and turn inside my head
And my head burns
Like white-hot iron
Handa Pollak, from her notebook, Všechno, 1944
The suitcases and the backpacks were packed. On May 14, Otto Pollak noted: “Said our early morning goodbyes to Hermann, See Strasse 16, and to Trude and Lea. They are all calm and resigned. At ten o’clock last night Hermann and I agreed upon a code for our letters.”
“We watched people moving down the street, dragging their bags and suitcases, their transport numbers hung around their necks, and we were terribly afraid,” Judith Schwarzbart recalls. “No one knew where they were going. No one knew what the Germans had in mind. No one knew if we would ever see one another again. And the people passing below us there, they were afraid, too.”
Among them were Mimi Sander and her mother, Frau Porges. “Unforgettable sight,” Otto Pollak wrote in his diary that same day. “Hugo in the little wagon. Mother Porges bracing herself at the rear. Mimi, composed and holding her head up high, linking arms with her stooping mother. Gustav is pulling the wagon. Hugo’s steering shaft breaks. Let’s hope it’s not a bad omen.”
Miriam and Hanka also made their way to the Hamburg Barracks. Everything was in an uproar. In one part of the building people were assembling to be transported out; in another part were new arrivals from other transports. Suddenly amid the throng Hanka spotted Eva Ginz, a friend and former classmate from the Jewish School in Prague and the sister of Petr Ginz. “I can still see her there before me,” Hanka recalls. “I’m standing under the porch and we wave to each other from a distance. I’m leaving Theresienstadt and Eva is just arriving.” It was a reunion and a goodbye all in one. Neither knew what lay before her.
May 15. “Hermann, Trude, and Lea left in a cattle car at two o’clock.” The total number was twenty-five hundred people; this was the first group. The lists for the second were already prepared. Another mass of people moved toward the assembly point in the Hamburg Barracks, where both L 2 and the train tracks ran along the rear facade. Countless trains, loaded with thousands of human beings, had been rolling in the direction of Auschwitz. These transport hubs for transports were referred to as “sluices.”
In reality, the entire ghetto had become a sluice. “An endless stream of hundreds of thousands of lives poured in,” Jindřich Flusser has written, “slowing down for a moment as the water level rose, seemingly calm, until it reached the brink of the sluice. This space had the capacity for up to 35,000 naked human lives. They were herded here from Prague and Vitkovice, from Hamburg and Vienna. The water level kept rising— until the sluice was emptied. Men and women and children were washed by the thousands, even tens of thousands, out of this dusty basin and borne eastward on a river of death.”8
Flaška, Helga, and many of the other girls had volunteered to lend a hand. Wearing white headscarves and red armbands, they sneaked into the Hamburg Barracks to do the one thing within their power: to give comfort to their families and friends.
The transport list for the third group was posted. Judith’s brother Gideon was on the list. “It all went very quickly. Suddenly he was assigned to his group. We didn’t even see each other. We couldn’t say goodbye to him.”
At the last moment, camp commandant Karl Rahm unexpectedly intervened in the transport procedures and crossed out the names of a few young people on the list. Why? The answer was soon apparent: They were needed as walk-ons for the great hoax. But by now the elderly and the frail had no chance.
“Poor things,” fourteen-year-old Šáry Weinstein wrote in her diary. “They will die soon enough in any case, and they could do that here just as well. This is supposed to be a model ghetto after all, so why do they send people away, especially old people? Maybe because it wouldn’t seem so nice if others saw them begging for a bowl of disgusting soup? The town is overcrowded, and that doesn’t leave a good impression either.”9
“In this one week, 7,500 Jews have left the ghetto and are being taken somewhere into an unknown future, but we don’t know where that is,” Gonda Redlich jotted in his diary. “They’re leaving in order to make more room. And now a ‘commission’ will be visiting the city and will render its verdict: Everything is fine. The town is so lovely, with a whole lot of children’s homes, coffeehouses, wonderful halls and green gardens; the Jews live in spacious rooms.”10
Transport Dz (May 15), Transport Ea (May 16), and Transport Eb (May 18) bore their cargo of 7,503 people toward the East. The town’s population sank to about 28,000—less than half of what it had been at its highest point in September 1942. There was a little more air in the ghetto, but no one was breathing a sigh of relief. “After the commotion of the last few days, calmness has returned,” Otto Pollak noted on May 19, “a mournful calmness and loneliness.”
The paralyzing calm that reigned in Theresienstadt after the May transports gave way to a phase of hectic activity. Anyone who could change to a better bunk or better quarters did so. Some of the prominent people were assigned to a room of their own, so they could live together with their families. Improvements were made in the living arrangements of the Danes, and a couple of rooms—all on the ground floor of buildings visible from Haupt Strasse—were nicely furnished, with pictures on the walls, flowerpots on the windowsills, and pretty curtains at the windows.
But in the larger rooms of the barracks, in the attics and rear courtyards, and on the third floor of the Girls’ Home, in Room 28, everything remained just as it was.
The sole objects of the beautification campaign were public buildings and those quarters that were sure to strike the eye of the upcoming visitors—a delegation from the International Red Cross, which everyone had been talking about for months11—or that could be strategically called to their attention. Along with the quarters of a few prominent people and the Danes, these buildings included the Bank of the Jewish Self-Administration, the town hall, the post office, the children’s nursery, the coffeehouse, and the Sokolovna. And
of course the “mayor’s office” in the Magdeburg Barracks—the headquarters of the Jewish Self-Administration and the Council of Elders.
As part of this short-lived deceptive maneuver, these buildings were scrubbed until they shone, as were a few streets, courtyards, and pathways. “Everyone was assigned to the cleanup,” recalls the pianist Alice Herz-Sommer, who herself was ordered to join a street-cleaning brigade. “We mopped the streets, we cleaned the coffeehouse, and there was one shop that had to be cleaned as well, and its displays tidied up. The bank and the hospitals, too. It all had to be clean as a whistle. Picture this little town with its usual population of five thousand—it was full of people wherever you went; it was black with people! It was such a little place that you could hardly move. There was no possible way to clean it up properly.”
The Bank of the Jewish Self-Administration was founded on orders from the SS and opened on May 12, 1943. It was the crowning achievement of the hoax and played the key role in the entire fraud. Even bank notes were printed—ghetto kronas.
Theresienstadt, “the face of an involuntary community,” as H. G. Adler has called it,12 was a perfect deception, built on smoke and mirrors. Else Krása wrote a poem about it with a telling title: “As If.” She dedicated the poem to Leo Strauss, son of the “operetta king” Oscar Strauss and one of the chief writers for the Theresienstadt cabaret:
I know a little town A town
that has some spiff
I’ll not betray its name
So let’s call it “As If.”
Leo Strauss set this little verse to brilliant music. In Theresienstadt these words came to form a kind of running joke, but also a philosophy of life and survival, and a motto.
And so when Helga’s fourteenth birthday came around on May 28, 1944, it was celebrated in accordance with this motto—much to the surprise of the birthday girl, who only a few weeks earlier had said to her father, “If there are transports and my friends have to leave, my birthday will be a very sad one, because we have lived like sisters in our Home.”
Now it was all turning out very differently. Helga was invited to a “festive seven-course banquet in the Grand-Hôtel Hecht, Bahnhof Strasse 31.” One course after another was served in the “as if mode: “Bean soup with noodles, spring vegetables, snow-peas and carrots with roasted potatoes on onions, sardine snacks on toast, open-face sandwiches with sausage and bacon, pineapple pudding, mocha à la ghetto with pastries, ending with a selection of desserts.” Only a wisp of these delicacies actually appeared on the table, but where quality and quantity were not what they should have been, imagination came to the rescue— daily life in the camp offered lots of opportunities for that.13
“The child wasn’t expecting such a lovely party,” Otto Pollak wrote that same evening in his diary. “At five o’clock we distributed presents. The festive dinner, then, was at half past five. All those courses made us forget our Theresienstadt misery. During the meal Hecht [house eldest in the Home for Invalids L 231] gave a stirring speech.”
Birthday card for Helga’s fourteenth birthday
Helga returned to Room 28 laden with gifts. By Theresienstadt standards, what she held in her hands was a small fortune. We know this from Otto Pollak’s list of her presents: “From Maria, a blouse, a winter and a summer dress, and a cake; from Hecht, a necklace and three chocolate bonbons, Odol mouthwash and Nivea cream; from Schmitz, two large notebooks and a wooden box; from Hugo, a travel manicure set; from Leuchter, the engineer, a bouquet of lilacs with two tulips; from Papa, a belt, a handbook, a bar of Palmolive soap, a chrome and nickel bracelet with a watch, and a Pelikan fountain pen with a fourteen-carat-gold nib.”
Unfortunately, we have no direct account from Helga about how she felt that evening. In 1956, during the Suez Crisis, when Helga was moving from Addis Ababa to London, fire broke out in the ship’s cargo room, and the container carrying several of her most precious possessions, including the third volume of her diary and her poetry album, was destroyed.
It seems quite likely that once the birthday celebration had passed, Helga quickly reawakened to the reality of Theresienstadt, just as she did after a concert given on April 5, 1944, as can be seen in this last entry in the second volume of her diary:
Menu for Helga’s fourteenth birthday: “A banquet served in the spirit of ‘As If!’ ”
Wednesday, April 5, 1944
Today I attended a Beethoven concert. They played a violin sonata. Taussig played the violin and Professor Kaff was at the piano.14 Then came a piano sonata that Kaff played by heart. He lived the music. He played with his eyes closed. For me it was like a fairy tale, with fairies dancing and singing on a meadow at the edge of the woods. There were small animals, too. Then came a loud rumble, and someone said that a dragon was coming down the road in search of prey from the Kingdom of the Forest. They ran off in all directions, looking for a place to hide. The fairies fled into their subterranean kingdom, the animals dashed into their subterranean homes and up into the trees, etc. And now the dragon arrived in the meadow. And what does he see, right under his nose? A little fawn who couldn’t get away in time because it had slipped and fallen and wasn’t able to get up again. The dragon grabs the fawn and takes his prey back to his castle.
The forest dwellers return to the meadow and sing and dance. But then the fawn’s mother appears, weeping. She tells them that she couldn’t come sooner to join the others because she was not feeling well, and had sent her fawn on ahead with the idea that she would follow as soon as she was feeling better. Now that she is here—she cannot find her child. They all join in the search, but don’t find the fawn, and they realize that the dragon has it.
So they decide to break into the castle very early the next morning while the dragon is still asleep and to slay him, thereby freeing the fawn and liberating their land from this evil creature. They all return to their homes and settle in for the night. Now only the owl hoots and the moths flap the air with their wings and fly, fly—black velvet with red stripes, gorgeous and glorious.
Dawn breaks, and the sun rises. Sunbeams shine through the branches onto the meadow, and a pleasant, gentle breeze rustles through the leaves. Everyone slowly wakes up. The small animals stumble to the well for a drink, and then the large animals go and slurp up the remaining water. Once they have all had their fill, they set out to free the fawn.
There are between ten and twenty small animals—rabbits, hamsters, and others of that sort—accompanied by the larger ones. Eagles and falcons fly above them. They belt out their song of war. They arrive at the castle and enter the courtyard. In single file the animals, both large and small, climb the stairs cautiously and quietly, looking for the dragon’s room. There they hide behind curtains and furniture. An eagle, who has been appointed by the fairies, gives the sign. All the animals come out of their hiding places and run to the bed where the dragon lies sleeping. They pounce on him—all the foxes, the eagles, the falcons, the weasels, and many more. The dragon wakes up, but he is dead on the spot. They free the fawn and return home singing a happy song.
In the nearby village the bells ring the noon hour, which can be heard on the meadow and in the forest. All the animals are in their homes or basking in the sun. The war has been won. You can see the sunlight falling through the branches, just as it did that morning, and a gentle wind is blowing from the south. The doe is lying peacefully beside her fawn. She licks it, and showers it with maternal love. And the fawn tells his mother all about what happened with the dragon, until it falls asleep.
And now the fawn is sleeping. Its mother gently licks its face. All is peaceful. The music comes to an end. The people leave their seats.
I don’t want to leave. Why am I in Theresienstadt? Here? Everything was so beautiful—and now this dark, gray Theresienstadt. I would like to slip inside the piano, where there is music. And here on the outside is the prison.
The main square in the center of Theresienstadt shimmered in lush green, interspersed with flower beds and
snapdragons that Judith’s father, Julius Schwarzbart, had planted on orders from the SS. The newly sanded paths were lined with freshly painted benches. The bright yellow of the music pavilion stood out against other facades now repainted in soft pastels.
“The park area in Market Square, previously surrounded by barbed wire, is gradually being made available to Jews,” Otto Pollak noted on June 1. “The residents are sitting down gingerly on the new wooden benches set on concrete supports—about seventy-three of them in all, which will provide a spot for a siesta for three hundred sixty people.”
Every day around noon, and again toward evening, the town orchestra gathered in front of the pavilion for a “promenade concert,” under the direction of either Carlo S. Taube or Peter Deutsch, the former conductor of the Copenhagen Radio Orchestra. The girls watched in amazement from their window. What did this strange hubbub mean? All the activity around the main square? Even signposts had been put up: TO THE BANK, TO THE POST OFFICE, TO THE COFFEEHOUSE, TO THE BATHS. Near the construction office was an old school, which until now had been used as a hospital; the hospital was cleared out, the rooms were given a fresh coat of paint, and school benches were installed. The next morning there was a sign in gold letters above the main entrance: SCHOOL FOR BOYS AND GIRLS. “It looked very nice, like a real school, except there were no students or teachers,” Helga Weiss noted. “But that little problem was resolved with a piece of paper posted on the school door, which read simply VACATION.15
The “shops” were given new signs and their display windows were decorated; the goods on display were expanded and extolled on advertising boards. No one in the ghetto was taken in by this sham. Everyone knew what was going on with these “retail stores,” as they called the shops. A witticism began with the question: “Where do you find the finest luxury shops in the world?” The answer: “In Theresienstadt. Because if you’re lucky, you can buy a shirt there with your own monogram already on it.”