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

by Hannelore Brenner-Wonschick; Hannelore Brenner

  “After the transports left that autumn, we came back to our room one evening and didn’t know what to do. Almost all the girls, all the counselors were gone. It was eerie in the ghetto,” Ela Stein recalls. “A lot of the windows stood wide open, and many of the rooms were completely empty.”

  “The last days in Room 28 were very depressing. All our friends were gone. The Home stood almost empty, the whole ghetto felt deserted,” Marianne Deutsch recalls. “Nothing functioned anymore. And then Willy Groag came and told us that whoever had parents or someone else in the family should move in with them.”

  “All the bunks were empty,” says Flaška. “And at the end there were only four of us in the room. So we took down our flag and cut it into quarters, and each of us took one. And we promised each other that after the war, when we all met up again, we would sew it back together as a symbol of our friendship.”

  Ela, her mother, and her sister moved into a building that housed many of the people who worked in agriculture. They were given a small room with enough mattresses to go around, and they could arrange things relatively comfortably. The 18,402 prisoners who had gone with the transports had to leave many possessions behind. There were now only about 11,000 people living in Theresienstadt.

  It took a while for the ghetto, which had come to a standstill, to be reorganized and begin functioning again. Only a few hundred men capable of work had remained in the camp, among them Willy Groag and the fathers of Marianne Deutsch, Vera Nath, and Eva Winkler. Women took over the jobs of the deported men, and children did the work of adults. Flaška, who moved in with her parents in the Magdeburg Barracks, worked in the fields at one point, then in the mica factory, and for a while as an errand girl for the administration. Marianne and Marta, like most of the children, were assigned agricultural jobs, but they did all sorts of other work whenever the need arose.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Liberation

  November 8, 1944 (from Otto Pollak’s diary)

  On awakening, the first snow. Meet with Marianne Deutsch, Helga’s friend from Room 28. She tells how she got out of being transported. How her father intervened so that M. gave P. the order to switch papers. In fifteen minutes she was off the list.

  November 19, 1944

  Four weeks ago today Helga entered the sluice. Quarter after nine, last goodbye from my child.

  November 20, 1944

  Forty-nine Dutch arrive, nothing but rags and neglect. Most don’t know their own names or where they have come from.

  November 22, 1944

  Spent a bad night, constantly thinking of my child. Does she have all her things? Is she perhaps freezing? This morning at six, as a kind of symbol, a young black and white kitten came running into the room; wouldn’t leave my side.

  In mid-November 1944, the commandant ordered that urns with ashes of those who had died be disposed of. The task was assigned to a group of about twenty children, among them Ela Stein and thirteen-year-old Horst Cohn from Berlin. As one of the boys who had hauled the wagon for corpses and bread through Theresienstadt, he was immune to death.

  “Death didn’t frighten us,” he recalls, “and certainly the ashes of the dead didn’t. We knew that there was a crematorium where the dead were incinerated, and that the ashes had been kept. We knew that each corpse was burned individually. It was pushed in at one end by a Jewish prisoner; the temperature was close to forty-five hundred degrees. Everything burned, even the bones. And at the other end stood another prisoner with an iron pole, who swept out the ashes, put them in a cardboard box, and closed it up. Next to him was someone who filled out the label: name, place of birth, date of birth, date of death.”1

  And now these children were to see those boxes, the urns of the dead of Theresienstadt, with their own eyes and feel them with their own hands—thirty thousand boxes, stacked on shelves that reached from floor to ceiling, all in strict alphabetical order.

  “The moment I entered the columbarium,” Horst says, “my eyes were drawn almost magnetically to the letter H—my grandparents were named Heller. And I walked over and in the very same moment I spotted two boxes side by side, at eye level. One read ‘Gustav Heller,’ the other ‘Ettel Heller’—my grandpa and my grandma!”

  Upon his arrival in Theresienstadt in May 1943, Horst had found his grandparents in the last stages of starvation. They had begged him for something to eat, and he had been unable to help them. A few days later they both died, on the same day, in separate hospital rooms. Their grandson had felt both shock and relief. “Because they were released now from the agony of starvation,” he says. “It is one of the worst torments a human being can know.” He continues:

  I grabbed both boxes, took Grandpa and Grandma under my arms, and kept them there while I loaded other boxes on the wagon outside. No one said a word. None of the other children had bothered with the names.

  Then the wagon started to move and I helped pull, but always with both boxes firmly under my arms. Then we came to the Eger, where we were ordered to open the boxes and empty the ashes into the river. We formed a chain and passed the urns from hand to hand. But I was standing down at the river and emptied the ashes of my grandpa and grandma into the river with my own hands. I’m glad I did. I buried them with my own hands. And I watched as the ashes from all those boxes spread out into the river, watched the river carry them away. And the Eger flows into the Elbe, and the Elbe flows into the North Sea, and the North Sea merges with all the oceans of the world. And I know that Grandpa and Grandma circle the world forever and ever. They are there. They will always be there for me. In my mind, the spot where I emptied their ashes into the river is my grandparents’ cemetery.

  By the end of the war some thirty thousand Jewish prisoners had been

  incinerated in the crematory that stood in the Jewish cemetery.

  Their ashes were kept in cardboard urns.

  During the late autumn of 1944—it was already very cold—the Germans ordered some of their young prisoners to carry out another special job. Ela Stein was among them. “We were supposed to help them hunt. They gave us two sticks and chased us out into the cold water, where the animals were swimming—I think they were pheasants—and we had to drive them off. And when they flew away, the Germans shot them. It was Rahm and Haindl and a couple other SS men. I think they had visitors from Prague. We had to do this for a long time. There we stood in the ice-cold water. Some girls were very ill afterward.”

  Ela was lucky, because her mother, Markéta, did all she could to keep her healthy. Markéta was a thoroughly practical woman and was assigned to all kinds of work. Now and then she managed to “organize” food of one sort or another—cautiously and at great risk. Sometimes she made pickles for the SS, sometimes she plucked geese for them. And when the sheep from Lidice—they had been brought to Theresienstadt after the massacre in May 1942—were slaughtered in the winter of 1944, she helped butcher the meat and was able to smuggle a piece of it into her room. She preserved most of it in fat. “ ‘We’ll keep that for the day our family and friends return. They’ll need it,’ my mother always said. And we began to save all sorts of things for that moment.”

  In the winter of 1944, Eva Landa and her mother arrived in Gutau, which was then a Polish village. Auschwitz and the concentration camps at Stutthof and Dörbeck, on the Vislinskij Zaliv River near Gdansk, were behind them. Their numbers had been reduced, and the work they were forced to do—digging tank trenches ten feet wide and twelve feet deep—was much too hard. For Eva, the worst part of the war years began now, in Gutau. She remembers:

  The first freeze came early that year, and it began to snow. We had no warm clothes, sometimes not even shoes. Wooden sheds were built, but we had to sleep on straw strewn over the bare ground. There was a stove in the middle of the shed, but we had nothing to heat it with. It was terribly cold. There was a brook not far from the sheds, where we could wash until it froze over. We were given no food until our work was finished—turnip soup and a piece of bread. Many o
f us came down with typhoid, diphtheria, and other diseases. We were plagued with lice, but had neither the strength nor the means to do anything about it. There was no light, and it got dark early.

  On November 22, 1944, my mother died of hunger, total exhaustion, and lice. My mother had fought so long for her own life and mine, but could hold on no longer. She was forty-five years old—I was thirteen at the time. By then I had almost no hope that I would survive.

  A week after my mother’s death, we were told that those who had no shoes or who could no longer work could stay in the camp. I was barefoot and so I stayed in the camp. When the others had left the camp, the rest of us were counted. They chopped off a shock of our hair, so we wouldn’t be mistaken for workers. Then we were led to the train station—or so they told us. We marched all day and all night. And I didn’t have any shoes.

  Suddenly we were ordered to turn around, and we had to go back the same long, weary way. I don’t know how long it took, because I hadn’t seen a watch in years. Those who were still in the camp were very surprised to see us return. They thought we would be murdered. But we evidently did march to the train station, except there was no longer a train station, nor were there any trains. The Red Army was very close by. We could hear the thunder of their cannons.

  When I returned from this “excursion,” I could no longer stand up. I couldn’t support myself on my feet, which were black and festering. The camp physician wrote down my number and said that they would have to amputate my feet, that they would never heal. But there was no longer any chance of getting away from the place, since all the roads were closed because of the approaching front line.

  I had wonderful friends in the camp—Gita Torbe, Eva Pollak, Resi Schwarz. They helped me so much. Without them I wouldn’t have survived it all.

  On January 20, 1945, we were given orders to get ready to march. This applied of course only to those who were able to walk. No one knew where they were headed. The Russians were close by. Anyone who could walk left the camp. I stayed behind, lying on the straw. And then the very worst part began.

  The SS men began “inoculating us for typhoid,” so they said. In reality it was phenol that they were injecting. But they did it clumsily, or didn’t have enough injections. At any rate I wasn’t given one, and no one died of it.

  The very same evening they then ordered us to go to the camp cemetery, where trucks would be standing ready to transport the sick. I couldn’t stand on my feet, so I stayed behind in the camp, lying all alone in deep straw.

  Meanwhile, my comrades had marched to the cemetery where the trucks were supposed to be waiting for them. But it was a lie, of course. There were no trucks. And on the way to the cemetery the SS men shot them all. They beat some of them to death with their rifle butts to save on bullets. The blows weren’t always fatal. Despite everything, a few of them managed to survive.

  Meanwhile, I lay hidden in the straw. The Germans didn’t find me. They were in too much of a hurry! That night, it was January 21, 1945, something incredible happened. The Germans simply ran away!

  The next morning the few survivors came back to the camp. Among them were my comrade Anita Fischer and her mother. They had spent the night lying on the road unconscious and had now come back to the camp. [Anita’s name now is Anita Franková, and she works at the Jewish Museum in Prague.] We had nothing to eat, and those who could still walk went into Gutau to beg for food. A lot of Poles helped them and even let them into their homes. But I only know what I was told, since I couldn’t stand up, and I had to make do with what they brought me. The Lithuanian women, who had more energy, cooked potatoes on top of the stove and gave me the hot water. It tasted wonderful.

  The next day a Red Army soldier, maybe twenty years old, suddenly appeared in our shed. He greeted us, but we couldn’t understand him. Then came a military doctor who treated my feet, which had turned completely black. After a few days we were quartered in the house of the mayor, who presumably had fled. The war wasn’t over yet. But you could feel the end was near.

  Theresienstadt, December 23, 1944 (from Otto Pollak’s diary)

  The first Slovak-Hungarian transports have arrived. Four hundred people. Nine who had died on the way were carted away. As a Christmas present we are given three ounces of bacon, a white roll, a pound of potatoes, and a boullion cube. What might my poor child have gotten? It has been two months to the day since Helga left.

  December 24, 1944

  An Aryan transport with furniture and archives arrives from Hungary. Also members of the Hungarian government, or so it is said.

  December 31, 1944

  Nine o’clock in the morning. Meet with blue-eyed, blond Eva Winkler, Helga’s friend, who I assumed was a mischling. Her father is a carpenter. Evidently that’s why she wasn’t included in the October transports.

  January 1, 1945

  Driving snow this morning. I’m constantly thinking about my child. In the afternoon Helga’s friends Marianne Deutsch and Anna Flachová come by with their good wishes. It hurts more than it helps, because Helga isn’t here.

  January 5, 1945

  Frieda’s thirty-fifth birthday. How is she doing, I wonder? Does she think we’re still alive? In her last Red Cross letter she wrote: Take care of little Helga until I’m able to see her again. If Frieda only knew that my only child was taken from me on October 23rd and that I no longer have any way to watch over my precious girl. I’m constantly plagued by my conscience asking whether I shouldn’t have left with my child after all, whether I didn’t betray Frieda’s last words of advice by putting Helga in the care of her counselor. The head of Helga’s home advised me not to go on the transport. R. Sticker and Dr. Altenstein told me that we wouldn’t be able to stay together and our only time together would be on the trip itself and that my sacrifice would be in vain. All these objections wouldn’t have kept me from joining my child on her journey into the unknown if I had both legs and could have carried my own baggage. I know what moral, psychological, and material support I provided for my child in Theresienstadt.

  The transport of October 23, 1944, carried 1,707 prisoners away from Theresienstadt, among them Helga Pollak, Handa Pollak and her aunt Hanička, the counselor Ella Pollak, Eva Stern, Laura Šimko, Kamilla Rosenbaum, and Greta Hofmeister.

  “None of us knows how long we were in Auschwitz,” Helga Pollak says as she describes her experiences.

  From the moment the train came to a halt beside the ramp, most of us were in shock. Had it been three days, or maybe six? At any rate, they were days without any food, any warmth, any blankets, any mattresses. We now lay jammed together on wooden bunks, six to a bunk that was made to hold four. No one paid any attention to us, and no one spoke to me.

  I walked around the barracks and wept. A kapo asked me why I was crying, and I said, “I want to be with my mother.” And the kapo, a woman, asked me where my mother was, and I replied, “In England.” She was so surprised that she gave me half a head of cabbage and a packet of margarine. I shared it with the people on my bunk. We were given something to eat, but we had no dishes, no spoons and things of that sort. And so we had no way to hold our food, which was always soup.

  Once, at some role call or other, a band marched passed us. They were playing music! I thought I must be in a madhouse, I’ve gone completely crazy. Another time the camp elder, Edith, a Slovakian woman, came in and asked us if we were hungry, and we all said we were. Then she asked who would help fetch a bucket of soup. There were several volunteers, and four in our group went with her. Eva Stern and her sister Doris were among them. They did not came back. Four other women brought the bucket back.

  Then Mengele came into our barracks, and we had to walk backward past him completely naked, with our hands raised. He selected several of us, either pregnant women or those who were too old or too thin. And then it was off to the baths again. And then we stood all day in rows of five and waited.

  When it got dark, we were rushed to a train. Many transports were process
ed there, and I was in a panic for fear I might lose my group. We walked past tables and someone handed us bread and sausage. Once we were in the dark, we all sat down on the floor. I ate my bread and sausage right away, because I told myself that this way no one could take it away from me, which is what had happened to the food I brought with me from Theresienstadt. It even happened with a couple of chocolate drops that I hadn’t eaten because I wanted to bring them to my niece Lea. But they took all my things away the moment we arrived, and then, too, I never saw Lea in Auschwitz.

  Handa Pollak has never forgotten her arrival in Auschwitz, either.

  After the first selection that took place immediately on arrival, we were sent to the showers and what happened there came as a horrible shock. It was as if we were in some awful nightmare. We had to undress and were shaved. The moment the women were shaved bald I no longer recognized them—they were like a band of monkeys. What I saw weren’t familiar human beings. I could somehow make out familiar voices, but couldn’t attach them to faces I knew. I became hysterical. No one could calm me down. I began to do strange things. We were given a jacket, but to me it seemed like trousers. I wanted to slip into the sleeves as if they were trouser legs. And when that didn’t work I grew more hysterical. I’m actually a very calm and composed person. But that night… It’s a wonder that I didn’t go mad.