I am also deeply indebted to Susan Cernyak-Spatz, survivor of Auschwitz and associate professor emerita at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. She translated portions of an early draft of the manuscript into English, and thus buoyed the hopes of the Girls of Room 28 that this book might someday appear in English.
Trevor Glover went to great lengths to help us achieve this goal. Aware of the compelling nature and significance of the children’s opera Brundibár, he embarked from his home in London on a fervent search for an English-language publisher at a very early stage of the project. Unfortunately, he was not able to place the book at that time. Still, his belief in it was not in vain—it helped me move the project ahead. I am deeply sorry that I can thank him only in my thoughts. Trevor died on September 12, 2007.
This trip down memory lane leads me right back to when the American journalist and author Peter Wyden was an integral part of my life. I owe so much to him, and it pains me to have to express my thanks to him posthumously as well. I began working with him in 1984 in Berlin, compiling information and conducting countless interviews, most of them for two of his books: Wall: The Inside Story of Divided Berlin and Stella: One Woman’s True Tale of Evil, Betrayal, and Survival in Hitler’s Germany. I learned what it meant to work with source material, to carry out meticulous research, and to stick to the facts—and just how much tenacity, stamina, and creativity are required to tackle a big subject and to put a book out. It saddens me to realize that my good friend and mentor will not be there when this book comes out in America.
In Germany I was told that I had little cause for hope that this book would ever be published in the United States. But here it is, thanks to Sebastian Ritscher at the literary agency Mohrbooks in Zurich, to my devoted American literary agent, Alison Bond, and to my wonderful editor at Schocken Books, Altie Karper. Thank you so much! You have made me and the Girls of Room 28 very happy. And although it took several years for the book to find a home with an American publisher, the dream has become a reality, a result of the dedication on the part of these editors and agents, and of Shelley Frisch, an outstanding translator who rendered the text in her native English and whose great care, attention to detail, and exquisite sensitivity to the story and the people involved gave it an authentic tone. Many thanks, dear Shelley! The girls no longer have to await the outcome with baited breath—they can now revel in the finished product.
I can still hear their eager questions: When will the book be finished? Who will publish it? We’re not getting any younger, Hannelore! Our conversations kept circling around a single question: When? It was certainly a long and difficult process to turn an idea into a full-fledged book. I try not to recall every twist and turn in this arduous route—just the positive outcome. And it was worth every bit of the effort! I really got to know the Girls of Room 28. No matter how impatient they grew, no matter what doubts gnawed at them, no matter what difficulties they faced, they always stuck by me unconditionally. We grew to be a strong group. This has been the finest part of this project. And so to the girls I say: Thank you. Thank you for your wonderful cooperation. Thank you above all for your unshakable confidence, without which I could never have written this book!
I would be remiss if I failed to mention another mundane but essential source of assistance—the financial support I have received for this book. I have lost count of how many publishers and potential sponsors I contacted, how many grant applications I submitted in the course of this project. I only know that now and then good fortune came our way, and at each happy financial juncture the project leaped ahead. I therefore offer my heartfelt thanks to the Maria Strecker-Daelen Foundation, the Foreign Office of Germany, the German-Czech Fund for the Future, the Robert Bosch Foundation, and the Walther Seinsch Memorial Fund.
That I was finally able to devote myself to writing the manuscript for ten uninterrupted months was made possible by a generous grant from the commissioner for the Office of Government Affairs for Culture and Media in Germany, and the advocacy of ministry secretary Dr. Matthias Buth, supported by Dr. Hanna Nogossek, now at the German History Museum in Berlin (DHM). I am very grateful for this help from the German government, which allowed me to complete the decisive last step.
My cordial thanks go to the staffs of various archives, especially to the Jewish Museum in Prague and to Alisah Schiller and Anita Tarsi of the Archive Beit Theresienstadt in Givat Chaim Ichud, Israel. Sadly, my thanks to Anita Frank and Alisah Shek come too late for these lovely women to read them in print.
I also mourn the death of people whom I interviewed and who became very precious to me: Willy Groag (1914–2001), who conveyed such a vivid picture of his experiences in Prague and Theresienstadt and of life in the Girls’ Home; the violinist Paul Kling (1928–2005), who became a steadfast friend from the time we first met in 1996 in New York, and whose love for music and nobility of spirit became a source of inspiration; and Thomas Mandl (1929–2007), who impressed me with his outstanding memory and his philosophical and kind nature. The death in 2007 of Paul Aron Sandfort (aka Paul Rabinowitsch), the trumpeter in Brundibár and a close friend, greatly saddened us all.
I also want to thank pianist Edith Kraus in Jerusalem and Alice Sommer in London, whose one-hundredth birthday on November 26, 2003, I will never forget. Nor will I forget the moment when Anna Hanuš thanked her for the lifelong inspiration she has received from Alice’s music, particularly her concert of Chopin études in Theresienstadt. This precious moment was caught on film for a documentary about the Girls of Room 28, directed by Bill Treharne Jones and edited by Paul A. Bellinger, both of London. I trust that this film, large parts of which were shot in Spindlermühle, Prague, Theresienstadt, and London, will eventually find the support it needs to be completed and shown. Thank you, Paul and Bill, for your unwavering faith and for your commitment.
I was unfortunately unable to include all the stories I heard, but everyone who shared their experiences with me made an essential contribution to the project as a whole. I would like to thank Eva Herrmann, Dagmar Liebl, Greta (Hofmeister) Klingsberg, Ruth Brössler, Zdenka Fantl, Margit Silberfeld, Zvi (Horst) Cohn, Leopold Lowy, and George Brady.
Special thanks go to Helga Hosk-Weiss, who once lived next door to the Girls of Room 28. It was in 1996, in her apartment in Prague and at the invitation of Ela Weissberger, that I first met several of these women. Helga Hosk-Weiss is a wonderful painter. As a child she drew what she saw in the ghetto, which is why the touring exhibiton is called “Draw What You See.” Her paintings can be seen throughout the world. I was pleased to read in a German review of my book: “The [children’s] drawings in particular, of which those by twelve-year-old Helga Weiss of Room 24 in the same Home have become the best known, can now be viewed against the horrific backdrop of daily life in the ghetto from the perspective of an unbiased child.”
A complete list of everyone who is inextricably linked with this book project needs to include a tribute to two individuals who accompanied us from beginning to end, and whose presence at the annual meetings in Spindlermühle was key to our success: Micky Kreiner and Abraham Weingarten, the husbands of Vera and Hanka. Their devotion and amiability, and their joy in spending time with us and in working on our project, helped spur us on to achieve our goal. Thanks, dear Micky! Thanks, dear Abraham!
I owe a debt of gratitude to historian Vojtěch Blodig of the Theresienstadt Memorial, who responded to all my inquiries and offered valuable insights. He also checked the historical accuracy of the manuscript. Thank you, Dr. Blodig, for your invaluable assistance!
Last but not least, I would like to thank all the people who accompanied me on the long road I have traveled, and who always offered their kind support when I needed it, in particular Tilman Kannegiesser and, again, Frank Harders-Wuthenow, both of the musical agency Boosey & Hawkes in Berlin, as well as my dear friend Eva Wuthenow. And I cannot fail to mention still others who helped breathe life into this book: Nicolette Richter, who was the first to volunteer to pro
ofread the manuscript long before there was the prospect of a publisher; Annette Anton, my enormously capable German literary agent; and Klaus Fricke and Jürgen Bolz, my editors at Droemer Verlag and Aufbau Verlag, which published a new German edition in 2008.
This English-language translation was greatly enhanced by two people. My heartfelt thanks go to Ernest Seinfeld of Connecticut, a survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, who offered valuable suggestions. I am equally grateful to Gabriel Fawcett, a young British historian, translator, and historical tour guide who is based in Berlin. I only wish I had meet him earlier. Gabriel assisted me in proofreading the English translation and displayed an extraordinary feel for language and knowledge of history. The book has benefited from Gabriel’s advice on how the girls’ story fits into the larger context of the Holocaust and World War II.
A very personal thank-you goes to my daughter, Hester, who is now seventeen years old. Since the age of four, she has lived with the melodies of Brundibár and with a mother who has always been busy doing research, making phone calls, traveling, and writing a book. It certainly hasn’t been easy for her. But whenever I found my spirits flagging, she came through miraculously, urging me on by saying, “Mom, you can do it.” How could I have disappointed her? Thank you, sweetheart.
NOTES
* Hannah Senesh was born in Budapest in 1921. A Zionist, she arrived in Palestine in September 1938. She joined the active resistance to the Nazis and participated in a parachute drop over Yugoslavia on March 13, 1944. The goal of her squadron was to liberate Allied pilots whose planes had been shot down over enemy territory. When Hannah crossed the border into Hungary she was captured by the Germans and sent to a prison in Budapest, where she was executed on November 4, 1944. In Israel, Hannah Senesh is regarded as a national heroine.
ONE Spindlermühle, Czech Republic, Autumn 2000
1. The Bielefeld production was the first postwar production of Brundibár on a major stage. The translation of the text by Frank Harders-Wuthenow and Michael Harre is now the authorized version, published by Boosey & Hawkes/Bote & Bock Music Publishers, and the basis for more recent productions of the opera. It is an unusual success story that owes a great deal to the Jeunesses Musicales Deutschland (JMD) and especially to the commitment of its former general secretary, Thomas Rietschel. In 1996 the JMD initiated the pedagogical Brundibár Project, which had an enormous impact throughout the world. It must also be noted, however, that even before there was a score or piano reduction or a text of Brundibár, Veronika Grüters, a nun and music teacher at the St. Ursula Gymnasium in Freiburg, worked with a group of students and went to great lengths to stage the opera in July 1985. In May 1986 this same ensemble toured Israel, giving four performances of Brundibár. Veronika Grüters had discovered the opera by way of the film of Brundibár— die Kinderoper von Theresienstadt [Brundibár—the Children’s Opera of Theresienstadt], Cineropa-Film (Munich, 1955), directed by Walter Krüttner.
2. The feature is now available on a CD produced by Austrian Radio (ORF): Edition Abseits, EDA 015-2, together with a second CD of the opera Brundibár in coproduction with Southwest German Radio (SWR), in a 1997 production directed by Friedemann Keck.
3. Fredy Hirsch’s speech on the one-year anniversary of the Boys’ Home L 417, mid-1943. Typescript, Jewish Museum in Prague, Terezín Collection, Inv. No. 304/1.
4. Ibid.
5. Livia Rothkirchen, “Der geistige Widerstand in Theresienstadt” [“Intellectual Resistance in Theresienstadt”], in Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 1997, ed. Miroslav Kárný, Raimund Kemper, and Margita Kárná (Prague: Edition Theresienstädter Initiative Academia, 1997), pp. 118–40.
6. “Musik in Theresienstadt” [“Music in Theresienstadt”], in Theresienstadt, ed. Rudolf Iltis, František Ehrmann, and Ota Heitlinger, trans. Walter Hacker (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1968), pp. 260–63.
TWO Saying Goodbye
1. Kyjov is the Czech name of this town, Gaya the German name. These double names come from the period of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, during which many cities bore both a German and a Czech name. Each cultural community used the variant appropriate to it. During the period of German occupation, German names were in official use. After 1945, these place-names reverted to their Czech version. In this translation Czech names have been used throughout, except when official German documents are quoted or when German names, especially those of concentration camps, are the more common usage in the English-speaking world.
2. “Sudetenland” was the term used by the German population for those parts of Bohemia and Moravian-Silesia that had been settled by Germans. It does not represent any historical, geographical, or cultural entity as such. The name is derived from the Sudeten Mountains, part of the Iser mountain range. The term “Sudeten Germans” first gained political currency with the increasing strength of the Sudetendeutsche Party, and then began to replace the competing term “German Bohemians.”
3. Hans Safrian, Eichmann und seine Gehilfen [Eichmann and His Helpers] (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1995), p. 115.
4. Deutsche Politik im “Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren” unter Reinhard Heydrich 1941–1942, ed. Miroslav Kárný, Jaroslava Milotová, and Margita Kárná (Berlin: Metropol, 1997), pp. 137ff.
5. Ibid., p. 150.
6. Jochen Von Lang, Das Eichmann-Protokoll. Tonbandaufzeichnungen der israelischen Verhöre (Munich: Ullstein, 2001), pp. 93–94.
THREE Daily Life in the Camp
1. Miroslav Kárný, “Jakob Edelsteins letzte Briefe” [“Jakob Edelstein’s Last Letters”], in Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 1997, pp. 216–29.
2. Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937), philosopher, president of the Czech Republic, 1918–35.
3. “Berichte zum ersten Jahrestag der Theresienstädter Heime in L 417” [“Reports on the First Anniversary of the Theresienstadt Homes in L 417”], in Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 1998, ed. Miroslav Kárný, Raimund Kemper, and Margita Kárná (Prague: Edition Theresienstädter Initiative Academia, 1998), p. 150.
4. Ibid.
5. From the testimony of Zeev Shek before the Commission for the Concentration Camp of Terezin, June 29, 1945, in Kurt Jiri Kotouc et al., We Are Children Just the Same: Vedem, the Secret Magazine by the Boys of Terezin, trans. R. Elizabeth Novak (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995).
6. Ibid.
7. Typescript of the “Report on the First Anniversary of the Theresienstadt Homes in L 417,” by Dr. Rudolf Klein, Jewish Museum in Prague, Terezin Collection, Inv. No. 304/1.
8. “Theresienstädter Kindertagebücher, Helga Kinsky, Helga Weissová-Hošková, Charlotte Verešová,” in Iltis, Ehrmann, and Heitlinger, eds., Theresienstadt, pp. 114–24.
9. Typescript of a submission to an essay contest held on the anniversary of the Girls’ Home L 410, October 18, 1943. The young author’s initials are R.G.; Memorial and Archive Beit Terezin, Givat Chaim Ichud, Israel.
10. “Theresienstadter Kindertagebücher.” Taken from the diary of fourteen-year-old Šary Weinstein of Prague (she later went by the name Charlotte Verešová). She lived in another room of the Girls’ Home.
11. In addition to this adaptation and staging of the Esther story, there was a more elaborate production for adults directed by Norbert Fried, with music by Karel Reiner.
12. “Kurt Singer: Musikkritischer Brief Nr. 4, Verdi’s Requiem” [“Kurt Singer: A Music Critic’s Letter No. 4, Verdi’s Requiem”], in Ulrike Migdal, ed., Und die Musik spielt dazu. Chansons und Satiren aus dem KZ Theresienstadt (Munich: Piper, 1990), pp. 169ff.
13. As we learn from Kurt Singer’s report, Tella (Ella Pollak) usually accompanied these productions. He writes: “Presumably Schächter would have speeded up the tempo of the Dies Irae if he had had an orchestra instead of a piano (placed in an inconvenient spot, but played excellently by Miss Pollak).”
14. Rosa Engländerová, “Unsere Aufgabe, unser Weg” [“Our Task, Our Path”], in Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 1998, pp. 169-
71.
15. Egon (Gonda) Redlich, “Die dreifache Aufgabe der Jugendfürsorge” [“The Threefold Task of Youth Welfare”], in Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 1998, pp. 154–56.
16. See Kotouc et al., We Are Children Just the Same.
17. Typescript of a submission to an essay contest held on the anniversary of the Girls’ Home L 410, October 18, 1943. Memorial and Archive Beit Terezin, Givat Chaim Ichud, Israel.
18. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960), p. 939.
19. Willy Groag in a conversation with the author in Israel, 1999. Willy Groag died on October 10, 2001.
20. Von Lang, Das Eichmann-Protokoll, pp. 221–22.
21. Ruth Bondy, “Es gab einen Kameraden. Die Kinderzeitung Kamerád im Ghetto Theresienstadt” [“There Once Was a Comrade. The Children’s Periodical Kamerád in Theresienstadt Ghetto”], in Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 1997, pp. 248–61.
22. Web site of the House of the Wannsee Conference, Memorial Center: www.ghwk.de/deut/ausstellung2006.htm.
23. Gerhart M. Riegner, “Die Beziehung des Roten Kreuzes zu Theresienstadt in der Endphase des Krieges [“The Relationship Between the Red Cross and Theresienstadt in the Final Phase of the War”], in Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 1996, ed. Miroslav Kárný, Raimund Kemper, and Margita Kárná (Prague: Edition Theresienstädter Initiative Academia, 1996), pp. 19–30.
The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope, and Survival in Theresienstadt Page 34
