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

by Hannelore Brenner-Wonschick; Hannelore Brenner

  We were given a few pieces of clothing—a light dress, a pajama jacket, a pair of socks. But no underwear, and it was October. We were in Poland, and it was very cold. We grabbed shoes at random from a big pile, without any regard to size or whether they matched. The shoes I got were much too big. But that wasn’t so bad. It was much worse if someone got shoes that were too small.

  Then we were taken to our block, with its three-tiered bunk beds. But whereas we had slept two to a bunk in Theresienstadt, here it was six, all under one blanket. Anyone who wanted to roll over had to ask the others first; it would have been impossible otherwise. That’s how close we lay to one another.

  After a week there was another selection. We had to undress and march past an SS doctor, with our hands raised. I had no problem passing, because I was tall for my age. But as Tella walked past him, she had to stand still. It was a frightening moment. We didn’t know whether she would make it. He checked her over. Tella was very thin. He hesitated. Then he let her pass.

  We were taken to another camp, close to the Auschwitz train tracks. We were given underwear and a piece of bread. And then we were loaded onto trains again. They took us to Germany, to Oederan in Saxony, near Chemnitz. There we were brought to a factory. It was directly beside the tracks, which meant that trains could be easily loaded and unloaded. And there we got off.

  In January 1945 the SS ordered ten wooden barracks to be built in Theresienstadt. Children were also put to work constructing them. Flaška had to break up the ground with a rake, but her gloves had so many holes that she froze terribly.

  No one knew why these barracks were being built. All anyone knew was that the SS attached great importance to them, because they drove the prisoners to work at a feverish pace. Little Marta Fröhlich pushed heavy carts of loamy soil up a narrow wooden ramp, sometimes under the watchful eye of Commandant Rahm, who stood nearby, legs astraddle. “I always trembled when I saw him. One time my cart upended, and everything fell out. I was horribly afraid.” But her comrades quickly came over and helped her deal with the accident, and nothing happened.

  In February 1945 more mysterious construction projects, closely guarded by the SS, were begun. Sealed storerooms were to be built in the casemates of the fortress, and next to them, in a section of the ramparts, a “duck pond” was to be created. At least that’s what they were told. But the engineers managing these projects soon became convinced that they were for something quite different: a deadly trap into which the SS would drive the prisoners the moment the planned liquidation of the ghetto had arrived. There was talk of gas chambers; ever since the arrival of the Slovak-Hungarian transport on December 23, 1944, everyone in the ghetto knew what awful things had been happening elsewhere. And so the prisoners began to sabotage the construction work. But these efforts were of little consequence because of new developments, of which the prisoners were becoming increasingly aware.

  Aware of their imminent defeat, the Germans were growing uneasy, and they were divided about how the remaining prisoners at Theresienstadt should be handled: Kill them all and liquidate the ghetto? Or create alibis and hide the evidence?

  “One day I saw smoke somewhere and I went to find its source,” Horst Cohn recalls. “And then I saw six SS men burning filed papers out in an open field. One of them turned around and saw me. And all six of them instantly pulled out their pistols and fired at me. I ran away as fast as I could, at the speed of lightning, but in a zigzag, hitting the ground again and again, like the way the rabbit gets away from the fox in the story. Then I reached a house and hid. I’ve always said that the Brothers Grimm saved my life.”

  In early February 1945 there suddenly came word that a transport with twelve hundred prisoners was to be sent to Switzerland. “Are they crazy?” Ela can clearly remember even today how outraged her mother was. “They can’t believe we’re going to fall for that! That a transport is actually going to Switzerland! After all that has happened! After so many people were forced to leave and not one of them has ever returned!” Ela and her mother did not volunteer for that transport.

  Among those who were put on the list for this transport were Eva Winkler and her family—but not because her parents were anxious to get on it. Karl Rahm had personally added their names. Up to the last moment the Winklers doubted that this transport was really going to Switzerland and fearfully awaited their departure. “But when we saw that we were traveling on a real passenger train and not in those cattle cars,” Eva says, “we gathered fresh hope that it might perhaps be true.”

  This time they were not disappointed. The train was bound for Switzerland and brought its passengers, among them Horst Cohn and his parents, safely over the border. Postcards that arrived in Theresienstadt a few days later confirmed the incredible news for those left behind. Was their long-awaited liberation actually close at hand?

  The drone of airplanes, which could be heard ever more frequently now, bolstered their hopes. As did the shiny silver strips, more and more of which rained down on the ghetto—they came from Allied planes dropping strips of tinfoil to avoid being picked up on German radar screens. The residents of the ghetto took notice. Two of these tinfoil strips can be found in Vera Nath’s album, along with the words “Forbidden to pick these up.”

  When Adolf Eichmann showed up yet again in Theresienstadt on March 5, 1945, he ordered a new “beautification.” The cemetery was to be tidied up and decorated with little gravestones; the prisoners’ quarters were to be whitewashed, the kitchens cleaned, the coffeehouse, the stages, and the house of worship all reopened. What was the point? Did this herald the end of the war? All signs pointed in that direction.

  In mid-April, Theresienstadt was treated to yet another big surprise. The Danes were told to get ready to go home. The news spread like wildfire. And on Friday, April 13, 1945, between eight and ten in the evening, several white Red Cross buses drove up, all of them fitted out luxuriously. The Swedes escorting these buses even distributed food, cigarettes, and sweets among the other prisoners and made no attempt to hide their disdain for the Nazis. Paul Rabinowitsch, the trumpeter from Brundibár, climbed aboard one of the buses along with his mother and stepfather, as did 412 other Danes. He couldn’t believe his good fortune. “Those left behind stood there waving and weeping,” he would write decades later. “They had felt somehow safe as long as the Danes were there. But what would become of them once the Danes were gone?”2

  Those left behind did not know what their liberation would be like. But their belief that it was going to happen very soon grew stronger with every day—as did the bonds of friendships among the four remaining girls of Room 28: Ela, Flaška, Marta, and Marianne.

  As she watched the Danes depart, Ela recalled a song that she most likely heard in the early days of her confinement in the ghetto, when she was still in the Hamburg Barracks. She remembers it to this day, and mentions it in commemoration whenever she gives a talk about Theresienstadt. Ilse Weber, a poet and children’s book author who had been deported to Theresienstadt in 1942 and who died in Auschwitz in 1944, would sing it as she played the music on a guitar.

  You and I, what friends we are

  You and I, how close we are

  Theresienstadt is where we met

  And there shook hands

  You and I what friends we are

  Something we’ll not forget.

  You and I, what friends we are

  You and I, how close we are

  One day the gate will open wide

  The night will pass, the sun will rise

  You and I, what friends we are

  Our friendship will abide.3

  Judith Schwarzbart arrived in Auschwitz on October 28, 1944, along with her parents, Julius and Charlotte Schwarzbart, and her sister, Ester. At the first selection upon their arrival, she saw her father for the last time. A few days later, she was loaded onto a work transport together with her mother and sister and two thousand others. The trip lasted two to three days, and then they arrived at Kurzb
ach, a small town in southwestern Poland, north of Wroclaw. “There we had to dig trenches to stop tanks,” she recalls.

  These were deep ditches, and it was very cold, and all we had on were summer dresses. Somehow we managed it in November, but then it turned so cold that the ground froze. It was terribly hard to get a shovel into it—we had already dug very deep holes. It got colder and colder. We were given some sort of coats. Most were old rags, too long for some, too short for others, and wooden slippers.

  We were housed in wooden barns, a thousand women to a barn. We had only a light blanket—and it was the middle of the winter! When our shoes got wet, they stayed wet, and we had to work with wet feet. When it began to snow they sent us into the forest, where we had to drag whole trees to the trenches in order to camouflage them. I don’t think they were ever used, because it was already too late. There was an SS man there, a sadist. The women knew that I was fourteen, and so they always sent me into the middle, where the work wasn’t as hard. But the SS man kept calling me out and putting me up front, where it was hardest. The dragging left me with a bad back that I still have today.

  I don’t remember what they gave us to eat; it certainly wasn’t much. I think there was no breakfast all, and a watery soup in the evening—after working ten hours in the freezing cold. One evening I slipped out into the fields and hid some corn in my blouse—I was lucky no one caught me. I was always hungry. And once as we were marching along a street four abreast, I saw a door open and someone threw us something. I picked it up—it was a piece of bread, and we shared it. You simply can’t imagine what that piece of bread meant to us!

  One day we suddenly heard detonations and shots nearby. We hoped the front line was getting closer and that we would soon be liberated. But we were wrong. It was mid-January 1945, and instead of sending us to work they sent us off into who knew where. It was freezing, there was snow everywhere, and we marched on foot for days. At night we were herded into barns or pigsties that had already been abandoned. We didn’t get anything to eat, but in the empty sties we almost always found some potatoes or turnips intended for the pigs. We didn’t care. The main thing was we had something to eat. And it was warm in the stalls. All the same, many women died on the way.

  Finally we arrived in Gross-Rosen. We were brought to the washrooms, and were given different clothes and something to eat. Then they loaded us onto cattle cars, and our journey into the unknown continued. At the train station in Weimar the train came to a halt, and bombs fell from the sky. It was dreadful. The cars were sealed, we couldn’t get out, and the station was in flames. The Germans guarding us jumped from the train and took cover under the cars, while there we were in open cars watching airplanes diving at us with a hellish racket and dropping their bombs directly overhead. Horrible. You just can’t imagine it. Three women in our car died.4 I don’t know if they died of shock or from bomb fragments. The corpses stayed in the car until we reached Bergen-Belsen.

  If until then I had thought that nowhere could be more horrible than where I was, I was mistaken. The worst was Bergen-Belsen. No human being can imagine what Bergen-Belsen was, what it was like there! It was a starvation chamber. We got a ladleful of water once a day, with a few tiny pieces of turnip floating in it—and that was for three people, plus a slice of bread for each. In the morning, again for three people, there was a ladleful of “coffee”—some dark fluid. We sometimes fought—over a piece of turnip! Can anyone imagine that—fighting over a piece of turnip? I’m ashamed of myself now—but that’s how it was. We fought over every spoonful of soup! We didn’t fight because we were angry with each other, but over a turnip, over a spoonful of soup.

  We lay three to a wooden bunk. People were dying all around us, dying en masse. What an awful thing to be speaking to someone who suddenly falls over dead—it’s indescribable. A woman I knew, Suse Hoffmann from Brno, who was the same age as my brother, died right beside me—fell over dead. And once again, roll calls—where we stood outside for hours, no matter what the weather. All I can say is that I am here thanks to my mother and sister. I don’t know how often I fainted during those roll calls. Sometimes my mother braced me up from behind, sometimes my sister, so that I wouldn’t fall over and end up in sick bay. No one came back from there.

  It was mid-April 1945 when the Germans fled. They didn’t even leave us watery soup or a piece of bread. When the British arrived, we heard that the Germans had prepared bread for distribution, but that the camp elders had forbidden the handing out of the bread. It was handed out in one barracks—and they all died because the bread had been poisoned by the Germans, or so it was said. That’s what I was told. I don’t know if the story is true or not.

  At any rate, for those last twenty-four hours, we didn’t have any bread or any water—nothing. I wanted to drink from the well, but there were many, many people around it, because it was the only one. There were fights and brawls, and you couldn’t possibly get through. It was only later that I learned that many people came down with typhoid as a result of drinking the water.

  We left the camp in April, and we ate the buds off the trees. I told my sister, “Come here, eat it. It’s wonderful. It tastes like almonds.” Bergen-Belsen was a horrible camp. I don’t know whether enough is known about it. The only thing people know is what was filmed, the footage that the British made. Those truckloads of corpses with dangling arms and legs—that was Bergen-Belsen.

  On April 16, 1945—in the presence of leading representatives of the Hungarian Jewish Relief and Rescue Committee (Va’ad Ezra V’hatzolah) and a negotiator named Reszo (Rudolf) Kastner5—Eichmann’s henchmen Hermann Krumey and Otto Hunsche delivered to camp commandant Karl Rahm orders from Himmler to surrender Theresienstadt without a fight. Rahm, Kastner reports, was thoroughly surprised. His comment upon hearing Himmler’s orders was, “I no longer understand this world.”6

  The German front lines had fallen apart, the camps in the East were liberated, one after the other; the great retreat had begun—prisoners, soldiers, SS, refugees of every sort streamed toward the West. But the Allies had not yet reached Theresienstadt, and despite Himmler’s orders, the SS saw no reason to give up their control of the camp. And so they were still there when the first prisoners from the death camps in the East reached Theresienstadt.

  “Dear God, what is happening here; I can’t even describe it,” Eva Ginz, Hanka’s friend from Prague, wrote in her diary on April 23. “One afternoon [Friday, April 20] I was at work, when we saw a freight train passing. People stuck their heads out of the windows. They looked simply awful. Pale, completely yellow and green in the face, unshaven, like skeletons, sunken cheeks, their heads shaved, in prisoners’ clothes … and their eyes were glittering so strangely … from hunger. I immediately ran into the ghetto (we were working outside) to the station. They were just getting out of the trucks, if you could call what they did getting out. Only a few managed to keep on their feet (their legs were just shanks covered with skin); the rest were lying completely exhausted on the floor of the trucks. They had been on the road for a fortnight and had been given almost nothing to eat. They were coming from Buchenwald and from Auschwitz… . Then one transport after the other began to arrive. Hungarians, French, Slovaks, Poles (they had been in concentration camps for seven years) and some Czechs as well.”7

  “One very cold day in April 1945,” Eva Herrmann recalls, “thousands of people arrived. Many of them were wearing wooden slippers. When so many people in wooden shoes are moving along slowly it makes a dreadful noise, a kind of monotone clacking sound. We heard it at times during the night. And so we got up and followed the noise and watched and waited until the people arrived. We could see that there were all kinds of people from everywhere. They looked awful.”

  “We heard shots in the distance,” Flaška remembers. “We thought the army would be moving in. But it was the poorest of the poor who arrived, specters. It was horrible—many of them simply fell down on the street and lay there. They were emaciated, sick, starv
ed, just rags on their bodies.”

  “In April 1945, people from the death marches began coming back,” says Ela. “At first it was just men. But then one day a transport with women arrived, and we asked them where they had come from, and they didn’t know themselves! From then on I always stood and watched when people came back. They always passed by where we were working. They could barely walk! They just dragged themselves along, they looked so horrible, like skeletons—completely starved, exhausted.”

  “I was standing on the street beside Kursawe when the first prisoners from the concentration camps came back,” recalls Willy Groag. “They were in an inhuman condition, just skin and bones, their heads shaved. I was horrified; we were all horrified. And I can still see how terrified Kursawe looked. It really was incomprehensible. We couldn’t believe that these were our friends, our closest friends.”

  “The town’s heart stood still,” Alice Ehrmann noted in her diary on April 20, 1945. “And now they’re here. Stinking, vermin-ridden cattle cars, with stinking, vermin-ridden people in them, half alive, half dead, or corpses. They were pressed to the windows, horrible faces, bones and eyes. What had kept us trembling in fear, for months, was coming directly toward us.”8

  “When new people arrived,” Marianne Deutsch recalls, “my father, who worked in the Central Registry, had to enter people’s names in the files. And so he went out to these people and had a kettle of soup brought out to them. They fell on it like madmen. And my father said, ‘They must be from an insane asylum,’ and sent for doctors. The doctors determined that they were normal people, but that they had been through horrible things.”

  It was not just that these people had survived the death camps. Shortly before the Allies reached the camps, the SS had driven them westward, in the direction of concentration camps at Gross-Rosen, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and Mauthausen. But those camps were by then terribly overcrowded and the roads could not handle such a huge stream of refugees. The SS didn’t know what to do with their prisoners, so they would ruthlessly shoot and kill those who could not keep moving or who had caught their eye for whatever reason. Finally they started directing some of these “death marches” toward Theresienstadt.