The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope, and Survival in Theresienstadt
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MIRIAM ROSENZWEIG was liberated from Bergen-Belsen in 1945. Seriously ill with typhoid, she was hospitalized for a few weeks and then taken to Sweden, where she spent a year in a hospital recovering from tuberculosis. She then returned to Prague and immigrated to Israel in 1948. She also lived at Kibbutz Hachotrim for a while and, later, in Haifa. She married, and in 1959 moved with her husband and two sons to California, where a third son was born. She lives, as she says, a pleasant life in Orange County. “I don’t concern myself with the past much,” she says. “But now that the youngest of us are growing old, like many others I feel that our past should not be forgotten. We kept silent for many years. But now the time has come to speak about our experiences during the war, before it is too late.”
Miriam
Rosenzweig Jung
EVA ECKSTEIN lost her mother and her two sisters, Hana and Herta, in Auschwitz. She was transported from Auschwitz to Freiburg, near Dresden, where she was put to work in the airplane industry. After the deadly air raid on Dresden in February 1945, the prisoners were loaded onto open cattle cars and transported in the direction of Czechoslovakia. After a week’s journey with almost nothing to eat, they arrived somewhere near Plzeň, where the train halted for a long time. Over the objections of the SS, local women forced their way over to the prisoners, demanded that the cattle-car doors be opened, and brought soup to the starving women. The journey continued and finally came to an end at the Austrian concentration camp of Maut hausen, which was already under the protection of the Red Cross and was liberated by the Americans on May 4.
Eva Eckstein Vit
Eva returned alone to her hometown of Louny, where she found nothing as it had been. The grocery store and the house that her parents had owned ended up in the hands of collaborators. In 1946 her fiancé, Hermann, reappeared, and they were married a year later. Eva lived in Louny with him and their two children through all the difficulties of the Communist regime. In 1968, while Soviet tanks were putting an end to the reforms of the Prague Spring, she and her husband seized the opportunity to leave the country on a tourist visa to Sweden. Sweden became their new homeland, and Eva still lives there today
EVA STERN lost nearly her entire family in the Holocaust. She and her sister Doris eventually immigrated to Israel, where she now lives. An abyss lies between her current life and the years between 1939 and 1945, about which she prefers not to speak.
EVA LANDA’s odyssey did not come to an end with the war’s end on May 8, 1945. Leaving Gutau, the Polish village where she was liberated by the Red Army in January 1945, she was first taken, still half frozen, to a military hospital in Eylau, in what had been German East Prussia. In April 1945 the hospital was closed, and she was sent farther to the east, eventually ending up in Sysran, an old Russian town on the Volga, not far from Kujbyšev, which is now called Samara.
On that journey, Eva met a man who would change her life: Dr. Mer, the head of the train’s medical staff and a major in the Soviet army. He took a great interest in his patients, especially in Eva, whom he immediately took to his heart. Dr. Mer, himself a Jew, had lost his parents to the Nazis and lived with his wife in Leningrad. They had no children.
He decided to adopt Eva. “He suggested it to me at once,” Eva recalls. “But I didn’t want any part of it. I wanted to return to Prague. He told me I had no home in Prague, that I would be put in an orphanage. We were en route for almost three weeks, and Dr. Mer managed to persuade me. I thought that somehow I would be able to return to Prague after the war.”
Eva Landa, now Evelina Mer
On April 23 they arrived in Sysran, where Eva spent several more weeks in the hospital. Because Dr. Mer’s military ambulance train had farther to go, he asked the head doctor at the hospital, Leonid Ostrower—who was both a doctor and a writer—to see to it that Eva would be left where she was if the patients should be transferred elsewhere. A few weeks later, the patients were indeed moved to a civilian hospital, but Eva was left behind alone, among strangers whose language she did not understand.
By May 8 Eva’s feet had healed—they did not have to be amputated. For the first time in a long time, she went to the movies.
Eva remained in Sysran until the end of August, when a telegram arrived from Dr. Mer, informing her that he himself could not come for her, but that he had arranged for her trip to Leningrad. And so Eva undertook another arduous journey, this time in the direction of Leningrad, where she finally arrived on August 31, 1945. “It was early in the morning on a rainy day,” she recalls. “There was no one there to meet me. My telegram had never arrived. But I did have an address— Dostoyevsky Street 36. And there I would spend the next eleven years of my life.”
Cut off from her homeland and roots, Eva began her new life in distant Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) with an entirely new identity—as the daughter of Dr. Mer and his wife. She had no success in trying to learn about the fate of her immediate family, her relatives, or her friends. The letters she wrote to the Red Cross went unanswered.
For Eva’s adoptive parents, any talk about her past was taboo. She was to act as if her childhood—the years before 1945—had never happened. The fact Eva was a Jew, a survivor of the concentration camps Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, was a stigma that had to be concealed in the anti-Semitic Soviet Union. Just to speak of it was dangerous, and Eva was warned never to do so. When she returned to school in 1947, she told no one of her past. Nor did she say a word about it when a relative of Dr. Mer talked about her own experiences in Bergen-Belsen. And how did Eva live with this?
“That’s the sort of question to which I have no answer. I don’t know. I wrote to my friends Marta and Anita, but I never received an answer. I had no idea where they were. I lost all contact. And so I simply accepted what had happened, and what was still happening, as facts. Maybe I even actively participated in this game. I was young. I was back in school. I wanted to make up for all that I had missed. I wanted to get a good education; I always wanted that. I learned a great deal, and was rewarded for my efforts. In 1950 I finished school with honors for the best essay—in Russian! I was proud of that. I had new friends. I never spoke about the past.”
In 1953 Eva married a Russian-Jewish architect. She received her doctorate in German studies and became a university lecturer. In 1960 she finally succeeded in obtaining a visa for a trip to Czechoslovakia. The decisive factor for her had been a book she came across, The Death Factory: Documents on Auschwitz, by Ota Kraus and Erich Kulka. She wrote the authors a letter, which they arranged to have published in various Czech newspapers, and to which friends and one distant relative in Prague responded. She then received the invitation that enabled her to take a journey into her past. She traveled there alone in 1960, leaving her husband and four-year-old daughter at home.
Once in Prague, Eva was confronted with the shocking news that she had long ago been declared dead, and that the assets of her parents and grandparents—including real estate of considerable value—had been inherited by a distant cousin of her father.
In 1990 her son, Viktor Nimark, a painter and architect, moved to Germany. Her daughter remained in Russia with her family. Since then Eva, whose husband died in 1985, has been making three cities her home: St. Petersburg, Prague, and Frankfurt.
Handa Pollak Drori
HANDA POLLAK had been taken from Auschwitz to Oederan in Saxony, together with Tella and Helga Pollak, and she remained there as a worker in a munitions factory until mid-April 1945. The company, Agricola Refrigeration Machinery, Inc., was an extension of the Flossenbürg concentration camp. As the war’s front lines moved closer, the workers were supposed to be taken to another camp. But one camp after another was being liberated, and roads and railways were in a state of chaos. They were shunted from place to place in open cattle cars for weeks on end, until they finally wound up in Theresienstadt.
Handa and Tella returned to Prague on May 12. There they waited in vain for Karel Pollak; they had no better luck with inquiries sent to Olbramovic
e. Still hoping for his return, Handa spent a few weeks in Olbramovice with a family that had once been friends with her father.
Handa will always remember with profound horror the moment when she finally learned of her father’s fate. It was in the loft of a barn where Handa was hiding from the Russians together with the daughter of the family with whom she was living. Tella had been in Olbramovice the day before. She had wanted to tell Handa about her father, but couldn’t bring herself to do it and had told the family instead, which is how the daughter learned of it. It was from this girl that Handa had to learn the awful news. “Your father’s kicked the bucket,” the girl hissed. “And if you cry, I’ll slap you like you’ve never been slapped before.”
Karel Pollak had died in a secondary camp attached to Dachau on March 9, 1945, “of despair,” as a man who was with him to the end later reported. “After his bout with typhoid,” Handa says, “my father, my robust father, had become a specter. He was so weakened that he believed that if he was in such a state, there was no chance that we were still alive. He lost all hope and didn’t know for whom he should go on living.”
Of the thirty-one members of her immediate family who had been deported by the Nazis, Handa was the only one to survive. Tella wanted to rebuild her own life in Prague as a piano teacher, and she saw to it that Handa returned to high school and learned to play the piano. Handa’s uncle, Karel Ančerl, was looking after her, too. But Handa did not feel that anything was keeping her in Prague. She was drawn increasingly to Hanka Wertheimer’s circle of friends, many of whom wanted to immigrate to Palestine. “I was not very much of a Zionist, but I wanted a new beginning,” she says.
In February 1949 Handa immigrated to Israel as part of a Youth Aliyah group. Tella followed her not long after. Handa found a new home at Kibbutz Hachotrim, where she and her husband still live today.
After she was released from quarantine, HELGA POLLAK was not sure whether she should go to a sanatorium in Switzerland. Then came a surprise—a cousin from Kyjov arrived on a Russian truck, and from that moment on she was certain that she would greatly prefer to go home with her father. “Besides which,” she says, “I had found a louse on my pillow, and I said to myself, ‘I’m not staying one day longer. I have survived all this, and I’m not going to die of typhus. I’m leaving.’ The train to Brno was already there. And the three of us took it to Brno, and from there to Kyjov.” Soon they were faced with a terrible fact: Sixty-three members of Otto Pollak’s family would never return—not Aunt Marta or Uncle Fritz, not her cousin Joši or little Lea.
Helga Pollak Kinsky
In 1946 Helga’s greatest wish was fulfilled: She joined her mother in London. There she graduated from high school and attended college. In 1951 she married an emigrant from Rössl in former East Prussia, who had escaped the Nazis by moving to Bangkok and building a new life there. Helga first moved to Bangkok with him, then to Addis Ababa. This retreat to the Far East satisfied a very basic need. “For a long time after liberation, I didn’t want to speak German. Or even think of building a house or buying one. For years I wanted to be prepared to leave Vienna at the drop of a hat.”
Gradually her life began to take a more normal course. In 1957 Helga, her husband, and their two children returned to Vienna. They wanted to provide the finest possible education for their daughter, who had been born deaf, and Vienna offered the best educational opportunities for her. Another reason for their return was that Helga wanted to be near her beloved father, who lived in Vienna until he passed away in 1978.
Two documentary films by the American filmmaker Zuzana Justman include segments on Helga’s story: Terezin Diary (1989) and Voices of the Children (1997).
Ever since the first staged reading of Helga’s Diary: A Girl of Room 28, in Freiburg, Germany, in 2002, Helga Pollak has frequently accompanied me on the traveling exhibition “The Girls of Room 28, L 410, Theresienstadt,” to performances of the children’s opera Brundibár, and to other related events, where she offers her personal eye witness account and reads from her diary. In May 2005 Helga was a guest of the Theodor Heuss Gymnasium in Freiburg for the premiere of the play Ghetto Tears 1944: The Girls of Room 28, directed by Elmar Wittmann. The model for the main character is the diarist Helga Pollak.
ANNA FLACH (“Flaška”) was fortunate in that her parents and siblings survived the Holocaust. But she never again saw most of her relatives.
A new life began for Flaška in Brno. She devoted herself to music and became a pianist, singer, and professor of song and piano at the Brno Conservatory and the Janáček Academy. In 1955 she married the oboist Vitešlav Hanuš; each has shared in the other’s brilliant musical career. They have been guest performers together at countless concerts both at home and abroad—in Beijing from 1959 to 1961, in Beirut from 1966 to 1969, and in Sydney in 1968 and 1969.
Anna Hanusová-Flachová
Their son, Tomáš Hanuš, who was born in 1970, is an internationally renowned conductor. He founded the New Czech Chamber Orchestra and is permanent conductor of both the Prague Chamber Orchestra and the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra in Bratislava. In 2007 he was appointed music director of the National Theatre Brno.
Anna, who remains devoted to promoting music, belongs to the Dvořák Society in Brno while continuing her work as an educator. She is deeply committed to preserving the memory of Theresienstadt composers, especially Pavel Haas, who was born in Brno. Her unflagging efforts have resulted in many musical events. Over the last few years she has often served on the jury of the annual Verfemte Musik (banned music) instrumental and vocal competitions in Schwerin, Germany, which are sponsored by the Jeunesses Musicales of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and the Schwerin Conservatory.
Anna also serves on the board of the Theresienstadt Initiative in Prague.
Since the touring exhibition “The Girls of Room 28, L 410, Theresienstadt” first opened in Schwerin, Germany, on September 23, 2004, with the assistance of the Stiftung Erinnerung, Verantwortung, und Zukunft (the Foundation for Remembrance, Responsibility, and Future) and the Verfemte Musik festival, Anna has frequently been invited to appear as a witness to history. In the course of the many events and activities connected with this project, Anna and the other girls have not only shared their experiences, especially with the younger generation, but experienced wonderful moments together and made friends in many parts of Germany, the Czech Republic, and Austria. One particular highlight was the opening of the exhibition at the Deutsche Bundestag in conjunction with National Holocaust Memorial Day in January 2008; eight of the girls from Room 28 were invited to Berlin to participate.
What Anna has said about her motivation for involvement applies equally to all the girls: “I see it as my duty to speak about our experiences in the Holocaust, all the more in view of the growing chorus of voices denying, ignoring, or belittling it. I do not want those years to be forgotten or denied.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My God, my God
May these things never cease:
The sand and the sea
The rushing of the waters
The lightning in the heavens
The prayer of man
—Hannah Senesh
More than ten years have passed since I first met the Girls of Room 28 and we began to hatch the plan of writing a book to commemorate the murdered children of Theresienstadt and the adults who lovingly and selflessly devoted themselves to the well-being of all the children there. I was also intent on relating the background and tragic story behind the first performances of the children’s opera Brundibár, which is how my own interest in this project began.
I would like to thank Frank Harders-Wuthenow, the music publisher who in 1994 first brought to my attention Hans Krása’s children’s opera and steered me toward a course on which I have remained ever since. Never has a project mesmerized me as this one has. Today I know why: It offered challenges, experiences, encounters, and friendships that have enriched my life and expanded my horizons.
I would never have been equal to these challenges had a series of individuals not stepped forward time and again to support the project. In 1999 Thomas Rietschel, then secretary-general of the Jeunesses Musicales Deutschland (JMD), got hold of my book proposal and decided to invite the Girls of Room 28 and me to Weikersheim, where the JMD is based, so we could work on the book together. In 1996 Rietschel had launched an educational Brundibár project and thus played an essential part in making this children’s opera known throughout the world.
An invitation ensued to Schwerin, where the director of the Jeunesses Musicales Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Volker Ahmels, had started an international competition for young musicians called Verfemte Musik (Forbidden Music). From the very beginning, the Girls of Room 28 project was part of the cultural and historical program accompanying this competition. It was in Schwerin that the exhibition “The Girls of Room 28, L 410, Theresienstadt” first opened on September 23, 2004. Since then, it has made its way throughout Germany and Austria. Thanks to an American donor, Dr. Alfred Bader, there is now a Czech version as well, organized by the Jewish Museum in Prague/Brno.
On October 3, 2002, there was a staged reading in Schwerin from the then-unpublished manuscript of the book. To our happy surprise, a guest at the reading, Barbara Zeisl-Schönberg, professor emerita of German at Pomona College and the daughter of the Viennese composer Ernst Zeisl, who had emigrated to the United States, spontaneously offered to translate the manuscript into English—and did so because, as she told us, she wanted to help us bring the book to the United States. Many thanks, dear Barbara, for your selfless, wonderful dedication!