On April 22, 1945, Benjamin Murmelstein, who still held the post of chief elder, let it be known that Paul Dunant, a delegate of the International Red Cross, had been present at a meeting of the Council of Elders. He had formally announced that the Theresienstadt camp could count on help from the Red Cross and that he was commissioned to establish and maintain a direct and permanent connection with that institution. “This is in fact the expected takeover by the Red Cross, even though the Germans are still here,” Erich Kessler wrote in his diary that day.9 The hour of liberation was now palpably near.
But there was still one last ordeal to face at Theresienstadt. The SS was still running the camp. Even though they were getting ready to pick up and leave, carting away everything that could be carted away, and even though their ranks were gradually diminishing, the hard core— Hans Günther, Karl Rahm, Rudolph Haindl, Ernst Möhs—was still there. Using whatever authority they still exercised, they blocked any help being offered to those returning and prevented emergency measures from being taken, such as inoculations to stop typhoid and other epidemics from spreading to the rest of the population. It was impossible to isolate the sick from the healthy. Medicines were in short supply, there were too few nurses, and there was not enough food for the approximately thirteen thousand thoroughly exhausted people who had been arriving since April. Many of them died shortly before liberation became a reality.
Hanka Wertheimer and her mother had been transported to Hamburg in July 1944 with a working brigade. Along the way several cars were uncoupled and shunted in a different direction. Miriam Rosenzweig and the counselor Eva Weiss were in one of them, and they were sent to Christianstadt, a secondary camp at Gross-Rosen not far from Wroclaw. Hanka, however, ended up in Hamburg. The city had been badly ravaged by bombs, and the women were put to work clearing rubble and rebuilding.
Hanka recalls:
We were given a special uniform, beige overalls and a pastel blue headscarf. And that’s how we marched through the streets. We were always five abreast and sometimes sang songs like “After Every December Comes the Month of May.”
Of course the residents of Hamburg had to be given some explanation about who we were, and so they were told we were convicts and came from a prison. That’s how we were presented—as criminals, as murderers and thieves. That’s what was printed in the newspaper, too.
We built streets in a new settlement in Hamburg-Neugraben. Sometimes we scavenged for food in garbage cans and made soup of it—we had a place to cook. When people saw us looking for scraps in their garbage, they sometimes put out something edible for us, wrapping it in newspaper and laying it next to the garbage cans, and then we’d find maybe a potato, or an onion, or a piece of bread. Then we’d cook our soup. Those were the best soups!
We had a guard from the Wehrmacht. He was very fat and, in comparison to the others, very nice. We even called him Papa.10 I remember a Frau Schmidt as well. She had read in the paper that we were criminals. And my mother, who spoke very good German, told her, “Do you believe everything in the paper is true? Do you believe that my thirteen-year-old daughter killed somebody or committed some other awful crime?”
The “Wehrmacht Papa,” who guarded us all by himself, let us speak with people a little, and so gradually we came into contact with the local population. A lot of us could speak German. Gradually people realized that we weren’t criminals. And many of those who had had their homes bombed and had very little left themselves were really quite nice to us.
I think we were in three different places in Hamburg—in Veddel, in Neugraben, and in Tiefstack, which were all camps attached to Neuengamme. For a while we worked in an oil factory. I remember that we got a very good soup every day at noon. The soup was so good because there were other workers in the bombed-out factories we were there to repair—Germans, French, Italians, all prisoners of war. Good soup was sent to these factories, and we were given some of it. It tasted wonderful… .
We were always closely guarded, of course. One day, the SS men found a letter one of us was trying to smuggle out. It had been written by a Hana. All the Hanas had to step forward. My mother was terribly frightened for my sake and told me, “You stay here, because your real name is Hanneliese.” They found the Hana they wanted. They shaved her head and sent her to Auschwitz.
Winter came on, and it turned very cold. We didn’t have any stockings and wore wooden shoes that let the snow in. Many of us got sick. And our overalls were all that we had. I don’t even know if we ever washed them. I only know that there were frequent air-raid alarms. The British dropped bombs, the Americans dropped bombs, and large sections of Hamburg lay in ruin and ashes.
I was always happy when there was an air-raid alert—because I thought that every bomb brought the end of the war just that much closer. We often fled to an aboveground bunker. These buildings weren’t really meant for us prisoners. But the Germans who guarded us couldn’t leave us by ourselves. So they took us along. And we were always put on the top, the eighth floor, where it was most dangerous, of course. The Germans were right below us, so that we couldn’t run away.
I liked going to the bunker. I could finally get some real sleep. I was always very, very tired—I remember that. We usually had to get up very early to go to work. And we came back late in the evening. I got far too little sleep. But if there were bombs, I could get some real sleep. It’s strange—I was probably too tired to be afraid. And too young. I told myself, “I haven’t committed any crime; why should anything happen to me?” What I really wanted to do was stay in my bunk and sleep. But sometimes my mother would make me join her in the basement, where we were better protected. Nothing ever happened to us, although sometimes bombs fell very close… . Then in April 1945, we were taken to Bergen-Belsen… . It’s really not that far away. But it took us seven days by train, because so many trains were going to Bergen-Belsen. Hundreds of cars, thousands of prisoners from every point on the compass… .
“In late April there were suddenly hundreds of people returning to Theresienstadt,” Ela says, describing all this as if it had happened yesterday. “I was on the lookout for familiar faces. Suddenly I recognized my friend Helga, and I called out, ‘Helga! Helga!’ I flung off my wooden shoes, which were much too big for me, and ran to her father and shouted, ‘Helga is here! Helga is here!’ I bellowed it like a madwoman and ran back so that I wouldn’t lose sight of Helga and could greet her before she had to be put under quarantine, because they were all ill. And so I found my Helga again.”
“I heard Ela shouting,” Helga recalls. “She couldn’t get to us because we were separated from everyone else right away and led to the West Barracks. While we were standing there waiting to see what would happen next, a distant relative suddenly came up and brought me a bag of something to eat that my father had sent—my father couldn’t walk very fast and so had sent his cousin. No sooner had we reached in for a bite than the bag was gone. Some Polish and Slovak women standing next to us simply ripped it from our hands.”
It was the end of April when Helga, Handa, and Tella arrived in Theresienstadt. Placed in the West Barracks, where the children of Bialystok had once been housed, they were handed something to eat, treated by doctors, and given beds. “When these poor devils were brought into the hospital ward and saw beds with white sheets, pillows, and blankets, they began to weep,” Erich Kessler noted in his diary. “They were undressed and washed. Their backs were covered with a layer of dirt as thick as your finger. Then they were given a soup that been specially prepared so as not to overtax their stomachs.”
When Helga had regained her energy somewhat, she asked for a piece of paper and a pencil and wrote these lines to her father:
Theresienstadt, April 1945
My beloved Papa,
I still can’t believe that I am here with you. I’m so incredibly happy that I can’t even express it. That I can be a normal human being again is a feeling you can’t imagine. The concentration camp is behind me now. And the only good t
hing about that is that I shall now treasure everything in my life. Papa, you can’t imagine what a feeling it is to be clean, with your own clean clothes on your body. Without a white cross on your back. To have your own bed, a blanket, a pillow, and to have peace and quiet and not have to be so terribly hungry. I always used to believe that a person needed to be rich, too. Now I see just how little a person actually needs. When I wake up in the morning and roll over and can stay in bed until nine o’clock, I am so grateful that I don’t have to get up at four-thirty, that no one is shouting at me, that I won’t be punished by having to stand for two hours of roll call the way I had to in Oederan. I don’t have to stand in wet snow anymore—three to four hours long. And we were grateful just to have a coat and a sweater, and shoes and socks, although the socks were much too short and shoes too small. In Auschwitz we didn’t even have that. All we had were wooden slippers that were falling apart, and filthy clothes that were too small for me. I want so much for this quarantine to be over soon. I’m so afraid we’ll come down with something here yet. Please, Papa, come to see me; we can talk over the fence if you have them send for me. Daddy, my dearest. I want to be with you so much! Try to get me out of here.
Please bring me my tattered washcloth and soap. The man from Kyjov, Markus, or whatever his name is, is living in the Sokolovna. Please go to him and come with him to the fence. Our window is right across from a bench. There are too many people up front, and we wouldn’t have any privacy there, and they won’t let you in the back part of the building here. But because he lives here, they’ll let you get closer with him along. And bring some paper for me to write on and fight for me to be moved.
Papa, please send word whether the coat I brought with me can be repaired. If only it were just a little shorter. And bring clothes from Frau Bader—maybe Frau Bader will have a blouse for me or some underwear. I don’t even have a knife here; I forgot to bring it and left it with you. And Papa, see to it that I get out of here. A hundred million kisses, and a big hug,
Your one and only Helga
The counselor Eva Weiss had been taken from Auschwitz to a forced labor camp at Christianstadt, where she worked for several months in a munitions factory. Life became a little easier for her. Although there was always a severe shortage of food, her life was no longer in danger. Things changed, however, at the end of January, when gunfire was first heard in the distance. On February 2, 1945, she was forced to join one of the death marches.
Eva recalls:
It was cold, the ground was covered with snow, and we dragged ourselves along. We weren’t the only people on the road. We saw all sorts of vehicles along the way, Germans and Poles who were traveling in the same direction we were. The Russians were evidently closing in at great speed, causing panic and confusion. It looked as if it might be possible to flee, but if escape was to be possible it had to be planned down to the smallest detail. Since I didn’t have the courage to run away all by myself, I wanted to talk a friend into joining me, someone who looked a little like me, not too Jewish—and that was Ruth Iltis.
We had one whole day and night to plan our escape down to the last detail. We decided to pass ourselves off as sisters of German-Polish descent, just simple girls. We invented names—Annie and Gertrud Hinze. The next day, when we got the chance, we disappeared behind some firs in a little patch of woods, hoping no one would notice. Shots were fired in our direction, but they didn’t hit us. And after that, they didn’t follow us. And so we found ourselves in unknown terrain on a cold day in February.
Eva and Ruth, now called Annie and Gertrud Hinze, first made their way to a farm, and from there they were sent to the “employment office” in the town of Weisswasser. People bought their story. They were given documents and an address where they could work as cleaning ladies. When they got to the place, they were in for a big shock.
We stared at the sign over the door: HITLER YOUTH HOME. What should we do? It was getting darker and colder and we were getting hungrier and hungrier. We rang the bell. The door opened, and we were received by a motherly woman. She gave us a room, just for us two. We were also given a key and could lock the door. We were told we would be put to work cleaning up the kitchen the next day, doing the least pleasant tasks.
The Youth Home was full of young boys in uniform, with flags, swastikas, and similar items everywhere. We pretended to be very simple girls, a little dumb and uneducated. The boys especially liked Ruth, now Annie, who was very pretty, but we kept our distance and kept to ourselves. There was always the great danger that they might find out who we really were. A few days later someone said we needed to have a medical checkup, and we were terribly afraid that our tattooed numbers would be discovered. What should we do? We tried cutting them out, but that wasn’t as easy as we thought, and our only choice was to burn them off. We had a stove with a fire. And while Adolf Hitler looked on—his picture was on the wall—we each laid a hot ember on our numbers. It crackled and burned and hurt, but we were doing it to save our lives. Afterward I went to the nurse and said that I had burned myself, and she gave me some salve and a bandage, which I then shared with Ruth. She couldn’t possibly show up with the same injury without arousing suspicion.
A few weeks later, we were summoned to SS headquarters and assumed that our charade was all over. But we were well treated as cleaning ladies, and eventually sent to a village near the Czech border, where we remained until early May.
Meanwhile, we had our roles down pat, and our relationship to the boys training for the front lines had become friendlier. We were even promoted to cooks, and to our great joy we now had enough to eat.
As the Russians got closer the Germans started to panic and ran away from the Russians and toward the advancing Americans— ”from Ivan to the Amis,” as they said. We joined them in hopes of soon reaching the Czech border. When we saw a road sign with the word “Liberec,” we simply vanished in that direction. It was May 3, 1945. Ruth knew the name of an acquaintance of her father’s in Liberec, and we knocked on the door. We were welcomed and treated with genuine Czech hospitality. Then we started out for Prague.
On our way there we experienced what for us was the only air raid of the entire war—a small German plane at low altitude swept wildly back and forth across the area, but kept coming back heading directly for us, and we had to take cover in a ditch. When the scare was over, we were covered in mud. We first had to clean up and so went to the nearest inn, where friendly people helped us. The people there started asking us questions, and we told them about our experiences. But when we told them about Auschwitz we could sense they didn’t believe us.
The next day someone saw to it that we didn’t have to continue on foot, but could ride to Prague. We sat on the trunk of a car that was decorated with lots of flowers and Czech flags. Some people tossed more flowers to us. To this day I don’t know who organized the trip. I only know: The hour of liberation had come.
In late April 1945, after a separation that had lasted half a year, Helga and her father were reunited at the very same wooden fence that had sealed the Theresienstadt ghetto off from the outside world for three and a half years and that was now supposed to keep the healthy from the sick. “Helga’s father was so happy,” Handa says, describing this reunion. “He wanted to give Helga the best that he had, and that was a little jar of butter. Helga hid it in her blouse, but we couldn’t resist. We knew that we shouldn’t eat the butter right away. But we each took a tea-spoonful and then another—without bread, about two ounces for each of us. And had terrible diarrhea as a result. We were lucky that it was no worse than that.”
Their girlfriends were happy as well, and they also wanted to make sure the returnees had food, especially some of the good soup that Ela’s mother had kept in reserve for just this moment. But after learning how dangerous fat was, they managed to get some sugar for the time being. Handa and Helga were so emaciated and weak that their friends had to do something to coddle them.
“Shortly after my return,” Ha
nda recalls, “a woman suddenly came running toward me with a cry of joy. It was Jitka, my governess from Olbramovice. She had been deported to Theresienstadt toward the end of the war. She began to weep, and I asked her, ‘Why are you crying? I’m here, and I’m alive.’ ‘But you used to have such pudgy little hands,’ she replied, ‘and look at them. They’re just skin and bones.’ ”
On April 29 word spread through the ghetto that the SS would have to leave the town within forty-eight hours. So now they would finally have to prepare for their departure, those gentlemen of the SS: Rahm, Haindl, Bergel, Möhs, and the rest of the pack. “Dunant is here, he’s in the Council of Elders, without any Germans,” Alice Ehrmann wrote on April 30. And one day later: “Capitulation—Churchill presenting it to the House of Commons… ? The excitement is getting unbearable. I just want to sob or die. Things just can’t get more intense; they have to come to a breaking point.”
“On May 2 the black SS flags and the swastikas were raised at half-mast over the Little Fortress. And we all knew on the spot what that meant,” Erich Kessler noted. “We also received confirmation that Hitler had put an end to his cursed life.”11
The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope, and Survival in Theresienstadt Page 31
