On May 3, 1945, the International Red Cross, under the direction of Paul Dunant, took Theresienstadt and the Little Fortress under its protection. “The SS finally has to make its exit,” wrote Erich Kessler. “The news is that Goebbels has been found dead. Rumor has it that peace is already here. Those who come from Prague are to return home within four days.”12
These were days for holding your breath. The end was in sight and yet all were surrounded by death. “We were told to be careful, to keep the windows closed, and not show ourselves at the windows,” says Handa, who was quartered with Tella in what had previously been Room 1 in L417. “There were still SS men and snipers who were firing at random.”
Handa could watch the exciting events on Market Square from her room, and she had a good view of the main road through town. Even so, it was difficult to understand what was going on there. There were throngs of people everywhere—prisoners, German soldiers, Czech policemen. A great deal of traffic was moving in all directions—trucks packed full of hundreds of black boxes, people from Prague and other towns coming to fetch their relatives, the vehicles of the Wehrmacht driving through town on the way to Prague.
“On May 4 I was awakened very early by a strange noise,” Handa recalls very clearly. “It was as if a huge swarm of bees was flying this way—buzzzz. I didn’t know what it was. I risked looking out the window. I didn’t see anything. But the noise got louder and louder. Finally I saw Russian tanks with a lot of people riding on them. They were former Theresienstadt prisoners on their way back to the ghetto, who had run into the Russians on the road. They were shouting to their friends and weeping at the same time.”
The Russian troops drove on toward Prague as well. And there were still scattered Wehrmacht units moving through Theresienstadt, with shots fired now and then.
“On May 5, 1945, which was my sister’s birthday,” Ela says, describing the day, “there was a great shout as the Czech police entered town under the old Czech flag. They drove through the streets. There was jubilation everywhere. We really celebrated.”
Bearing the flag of Czechoslovakia and singing a potpourri of national anthems, people stormed the commandant’s headquarters, and Rahm and Haindl fled. The Czech police took command of the town.
But in the barracks there was still hunger and death, and in Prague there was still fighting going on. Endless columns of tanks continued to roll through Theresienstadt, the sounds of rifles and machine guns were still being heard, transports of prisoners were still arriving, and SS men were still trying to escape.
On May 6 Otto Pollak wrote to his daughter, who was still under quarantine:
My one and only child,
I received the sweet lines you wrote from the West Barracks and was saddened at first to know that you will be leaving me again. I didn’t sleep much last night either, because there was so much to think about and I didn’t have my little sparrow beside me.
After much consideration, I’ve come to the decision to let you depart along with your friends who shared your fate in Oederan. I do this because I assume your transport will be under the protection of the Red Cross and that Switzerland will be the place chosen for your recuperation. I have nothing so beautiful to offer you for the next few years, my sweet darling, and I hope that you will enjoy the love and care of the Swiss in full measure. Do all you can to get out of quarantine, because I have so many things I want to talk over with you and want us to be able to say goodbye before you leave.
If you can’t come to me, Frau Sander and I will pack your suitcase for you. And I have a little handbag with toilet articles and some food for the trip to give you as well. I brought your diary out into the light of day today. It is in good shape. So for now, my little child, I send you lots and lots of kisses and remain,
Your Daddy
On the evening of May 7, almost the entire population of Theresienstadt gathered in the main square in order to finally hear the news with their own ears: Germany had surrendered unconditionally. The surrender documents had been signed the night before in Reims, France, by Colonel-General Alfred Jodl. This time there was no jubilation. The war was over, but there could not be any real talk of peace as yet. The very next day, the population was warned to exercise the utmost caution.
On May 8 the thunder of cannons could still be heard almost the entire day. But then the tension faded. Standing at an attic window in the Dresden Barracks, Vera Nath looked down at the streets below: “It was already late evening,” she recalls. “Around nine o’clock. Suddenly we saw a woman with a red flag, and we ran downstairs. The barricades to the ghetto had been opened. The Red Army was entering. They were all just children, fifteen-, sixteen-, and seventeen-year-old boys. We cheered them; what else could we do? We stood outside for hours and watched. Everyone sang the ‘Internationale’—in German, Czech, Polish, Hungarian, all blended together.”
Theresienstadt, May 8, 1945
! ! GENERAL WARNING ! !
In view of the hostilities occurring in close proximity to Theresienstadt, the following directives are to take effect immediately:
1) The streets are to be used only for official business. And in no case are the ramparts and walls or roads leading around town to be used, beginning at the Litoměřice Gate, Bodenbach Barracks, Dresden Barracks as far as the Sluice Mill, plus all roads leading to Bauschowitz-Litoměřice and all roads leading around the Fortress; moreover, everyone should avoid the vicinity of these roads.
2) It is forbidden to loiter near windows and doors or in the courtyards of houses and buildings! At the sound of gunfire, people should take cover against the wall nearest to the windows to avoid being hit by gunfire penetrating windows or doors.
3) Until further notice, children are to stay indoors!
4) If artillery fire should be heard, everyone should immediately take cover in the cellars of residences and larger buildings. Supervisors and directors in all buildings are to make sure that the entrances to cellars are kept open for immediate entry at all times. In such event, at least two men are to stand guard at the cellar entrance.
5) No open fires whatever are permitted until further notice!
6) If gunfire is heard, all streets and public areas are to be evacuated at once and cover taken in houses or beside walls.
May 8, 1945, General Warning
EPILOGUE
EVA WEISS and her friend Ruth Iltis were among the first survivors of German concentration camps to experience the end of the war in Prague. There they anxiously awaited their relatives and friends. “But only a few returned,” recalls Eva. “And all of them had a sad tale to tell. Everyone knew of many others who would never return. It was a time of highs and of very deep lows.”
Eva Weiss Gross
Since no one from her immediate family in Brno was still alive, Eva remained in Prague. There she met her future husband, a Czech who had emigrated to England and had marched into Prague with the British army’s Czech Brigade. When he returned to London a year later, Eva could not accompany him because she had no valid papers. Not until three years later did she manage to acquire a joint passport, which was issued to an aliyah group and allowed her to travel to Israel, where the couple was reunited. They were married in Kibbutz Givat Chaim Ichud. After a few months they moved to England, where she began a new life.
Eva lived in London for many years and now resides near Winchester in the south of England.
HANKA (CHANA) WERTHEIMER only barely survived the hell of Bergen-Belsen. Fourteen thousand people died there in just the first five days after liberation which had occurred on April 15, 1945 and another fourteen thousand perished in the weeks that followed, among them Hanka’s mother, Lily Wertheimer, who succumbed to typhus on May 16, 1945.
Hanka Wertheimer
Weingarten
Hanka remained in a hospital in Celle, Germany, until July 1945, and was then moved to a hospital in Plzeň. With her strength for the most part restored, she traveled on to Prague. “I went directly to Žitná 38,”
Hanka remembers. “Our Mařka was still living in the same little bachelor flat. She broke down in tears when she saw me. If she had met me on the street, she said, she wouldn’t have recognized me. I weighed only seventy-seven pounds, and was ill and deeply unhappy.”
Hanka had lost almost her entire family apart from her sister, who had been able to make it to Palestine in time, as did her mother’s brother. Of her father’s eleven siblings, only two brothers had been able to save themselves by emigrating to South America.
Mařka gave back to Hanka the apartment that Hanka’s mother had once rented in Mařka’s name. It was not far from Wenceslas Square and soon became a regular meeting place for Hanka’s friends: Handa Pollak, Ela Stein, Eva Seger, Stepan Krulis, Yehuda Huppert (Polda), and Jirka Brady, the brother of little Hana, who had perished in Auschwitz.1
In the first years after liberation it seemed unimaginable to Hanka and her friends that they could ever be friends with people who had not been through what they had. They could not picture marrying anyone who was not one of them. Images of the camps stayed alive in their minds for a long time. “It was such a strong force inside us,” Hanka says. “While we were in the camps, when we closed our eyes we saw bread. After the war, when we closed our eyes, we saw the concentration camp.”
Hanka and her friends often walked along the Old City Ring, past the Tyn Church, to the Old Town Hall with its astronomical clock, always keeping an eye out for some familiar soul who might suddenly emerge from the crowd. She thought about her friend Polda, but she could not bring herself to start a search—for fear that she would receive bad news. Then one day Polda crossed her path, and Hanka was happy to see him again and to know he was alive.
Hanka’s time in Prague after liberation proved short. Handa Pollak and she had just enrolled in school when Hanka was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She was placed in a sanatorium that was run by Zionists in Davos, Switzerland, where the beds were intended solely for members of the Zionist organization Hechalutz. She remained there for more than two years, during which time she attended middle school. In 1948 she returned to Prague.
In the meantime, her friends had moved off in various directions. Jirka went to America and Stepan to Australia; Ela, Handa, Eva, and Polda immigrated to Palestine. In 1949 Hanka also found her way at last to the place she had so long yearned for—Israel.
In Kibbutz Hachotrim Hanka met her future husband, with whom she spent many interesting years in places as varied as the United States, Bulgaria, Singapore, India, and Italy. She has three sons and now lives with her husband in Tel Aviv.
JUDITH SCHWARZBART and her sister, Ester, also escaped the “death mills” of Bergen-Belsen (to use the title of director Billy Wilder’s 1945 documentary). Like Hanka, they lost their mother shortly after liberation. Charlotte Schwarzbart died in a hospital in Celle, Germany, on May 5, 1945.
Judith Schwarzbart
Rosenzweig
In mid-July 1945 Judith and her sister returned to their Moravian homeland. Their brother, Gideon, was waiting for them in their parents’ house in Brno-Jundrov. He had found the house uninhabited and stripped of its furniture, apart from some things he discovered smashed and shattered in the courtyard. Except for a Passover plate and an old clock, which neighbors gave back to them, there was nothing left of their parents’ possessions.
The three siblings—Ester, nineteen; Gideon, seventeen; and Judith, fifteen—were on their own. Their parents and other relatives had perished. They were receiving just enough government money to get by. They attended school, but the cold winter of 1945–46 was a terrible one. “We did our homework,” Judith recalls. “My sister was studying for her graduation exams, and I can still see how a glass of water, which was always at her side and which we always kept wrapped in a cloth, turned to ice—that’s how cold it was. There was no wood or coal. I would have emigrated right then if I could have. But my brother and sister held me back until I was eighteen. I finished high school, moved to Hachsharah [a program/community that prepared people for immigration to Israel], and then on to Palestine in 1948.”
At six o’clock in the morning on May 15, 1948, Judith arrived in the harbor of Jaffa, on one of the first three ships to dock in the newly founded state of Israel. They were greeted by rounds of gunfire coming from Arab planes that swept over the harbor. That was the beginning of her new life.
When one of Judith’s aunts who had immigrated to Palestine before the war asked her what had actually happened to her, Judith began to relate her experiences. But no sooner had she started than she was interrupted by these words from her aunt: “Oh, don’t start exaggerating. It can’t have been that bad.” And so for decades Judith said nothing about those times. She became a pediatric nurse and married in 1951. She has three children and makes her home in Haifa.
EVA WINKLER experienced the end of the war with her parents and her brother Jiři in Switzerland. In July 1945 they returned to their home, first to Miroslav and then to Brno. They, too, waited in vain for the return of other family members. “It was a terrible time,” she says. “The war was over, and we then learned what had happened—that my grandparents, almost all of my aunts and uncles and their children, and many of my friends had not survived the Holocaust.”
Over the next few years Eva attended school in Miroslav and Brno and graduated from a technical high school. She never really felt at home again in Czechoslovakia. “There were many Czechs who had collaborated with the Germans. Anti-Semitism lived on. I had a teacher who made things unpleasant for me because he couldn’t bear the fact that I, as a Jew, was the best in the class. I also often had a feeling I was being followed, that someone was walking behind me.”
Eva Winkler Sohar
In 1949 she and her brother immigrated to Israel. Her parents had hoped to follow them. But then came Communist rule, the Iron Curtain, and the borders were closed. Not until the death of Eva’s father in 1968 did her mother move to Israel with her youngest son, Pavel.
Eva spent several years in Kibbutz Hachotrim, the same kibbutz where Hanka and Handa lived. She married, had two children, and now lives with her husband in Haifa.
At her first opportunity, MARTA FRÖHLICH traveled with her brothers and sisters to Pisek, where her mother still lived. “She was wearing a lovely pink dress when we arrived,” Marta recalls. “She was crazy with happiness! She kissed us and danced with us.”
Marta Fröhlich Mikul
But no sooner had her father returned from Theresienstadt than he started making trouble and was again abusive to his wife and children. Only after Jenda, who was now eighteen years old, returned home in September 1945 and resolutely stood up to his father did these violent episodes become less frequent. But there was no changing their father. All four of Marta’s siblings immigrated to Israel in the late 1940s. Marta alone remained behind with her mother, whom she loved dearly. Marta married, has three children, and now lives in Cheb.
VERA NATH, along with other children from Theresienstadt, including Flaška, arrived in Štiřin, Lojovice, on June 6, 1945. The Christian humanist Přemysl Pitter had turned an old castle there into a sanatorium for children.2 After a few weeks, Vera returned with her parents and sister to Prague, where they searched in vain for other relatives who might be alive. The trail for most of them ended in Auschwitz and Lodz. Only two cousins had been able to immigrate to Palestine in time. Her mother’s older brother, Eugen Kolb, a well-known Zionist from Budapest, had been aboard the Kastner Transport to Switzerland in late 1944 and later made his way to Israel.3
Vera Nath Kreiner
On October 28, 1948, Vera left for Israel, and was followed by her parents a few months later. She married, has two children, and now lives with her husband in Ramat Gan.
ELA STEIN lived for a while with her aunt in Kolín, and then joined her mother and sister in Prague. Only a few members of her large extended family survived the Holocaust— sixty-two of them were among its victims, including her uncle Otto Altenstein.
Ela Stein
Weissberger
“After the war I was terribly afraid that I could not be like other children,” Ela remembers, “that they would all point at me and say, ‘Look, she was in a concentration camp.’ But I wanted more than anything to go to school again. I wanted to learn. Even today I still tell children, ‘Don’t tell me you don’t like school.’ For me the most wonderful thing was to attend school again, to sit on a school bench and listen to the teacher without fear.”
In 1949 Ela was able to fulfill her long-standing wish to immigrate to Israel. There she served in the army for two years, married in 1953, and moved with her husband to the United States in 1958. She has two children and lives in New York State. In recent years, performances of Brundibár have brought her all across the United States, where she is an honored guest as an eyewitness to history. She has made it her mission to keep alive the memory of her friends from Theresienstadt.
MARIANNE DEUTSCH was happy beyond belief finally to rejoin Memme, her governess. She lived in Olomouc with her parents and Memme for several years, attending a commercial high school and then pursuing her profession. She married in 1954 and moved to Ostrava with her husband. But before the Soviet Union and its allies could march into Prague in August 1968, bringing the Prague Spring to an abrupt end, she and her husband decided to leave their home and take their ten-year-old son, Peter, with them. “We didn’t want to make the same mistake our parents had, who didn’t take ‘little corporal Hitler’ seriously,” she says. “We didn’t want our children to grow up with their spirits broken. So we left everything behind, apart from two suitcases, and fled to what was then West Germany, by way of Austria.” There Marianne and her family built a new life for themselves.
The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope, and Survival in Theresienstadt Page 32
