The Girls of Room 28

by Hannelore Brenner

  He had prophesied to the Jews that if they ever brought about a world war again, they would experience their own annihilation. That was no empty phrase. The world war is here, and the annihilation of the Jews must necessarily follow. This question is to be regarded without sentimentality. We are not here to have sympathy with the Jews, but only with our German people. If the German people sacrifice the lives of another 160,000 men on the Eastern front, those who have caused this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their own lives.6

  Shortly thereafter, on January 20, 1942, a now-infamous secret conference took place in a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. Its purpose was to coordinate the efficient implementation of the Führer’s wish for a “final solution to the Jewish question.” The host was Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office, the central office overseeing the entire Nazi security and police apparatus. The invited guests, high-ranking SS officers and civilian officials in charge of the German Reich and its occupied territories, proved to be willing executioners. The entire Jewish population of Europe was now fated for extermination.

  In the Czech lands, beginning in September 1941, Reinhard Heydrich had swiftly crushed a growing resistance. Four thousand Czechs were taken prisoner, and 402 were executed in the first few months of his rule.

  The Czech government in exile in London, the Czech resistance back home, and the British secret services agreed on a daring retaliation. On May 27, 1942, Czech fighters attacked Heydrich’s official car as it made its way into Prague. Heydrich was fatally wounded and died on June 4, 1942. After Heydrich’s death, Hitler ordered brutal revenge. It fell upon a village ten miles west of Prague called Lidice, whose inhabitants were accused of helping the assassins. The buildings in Lidice were demolished, all the men were shot, and the women were sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Most of the children were murdered in Chelmo.

  The search for the conspirators expanded in all directions, including into Kyjov. “After Heydrich’s assassination, all the residents of our house in Kyjov were ordered out into the courtyard late in the evening,” Helga recalls. “It was already dark, and most were in their pajamas. The SS from the concentration camp at Svatobořice, where Czechs were imprisoned, searched all the apartments and beat up several people, including an aunt of my father’s, Frieda Freud, who was handicapped and could barely walk, and thus brought the rage of the SS down on her.”

  By this point, Adolf Eichmann was presiding over the Jewish section of the Reich Main Security Office. He had already ordered the deportation of fifty-five thousand Jews from the territory of the Reich, which included “Ostmark,” as Austria was called after its annexation, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Starting in March 1942, forty-five trains (twenty-four from Germany, six from Vienna, and fifteen from Theresienstadt), each carrying a thousand people, headed for ghettos that had been established in Lublin, Poland. The systematic deportation and murder of Jews was well under way.

  The Jewish population of Kyjov had so far been spared in these transports, but everyone felt a sense of foreboding. They prepared themselves and took comfort in the thought that, as Czech Jews, they would most likely be resettled or, in the Nazis’ official language, “evacuated” to the Theresienstadt ghetto. At least, they reasoned, it was a town in their native land, less than forty miles from Prague. With a little luck, they would be able to wait out the war there.

  This photograph shows Helga (second row, first child on the left) with her teachers and other pupils in her class in Kyjov. It was taken sometime during the second half of 1942, after schooling for Jewish children had been prohibited and could take place only secretly in homes. Next to Helga is Jiri Bader (1930–1944), the son of a prominent Jewish family and a friend of Helga’s. Like most of the people pictured here, he did not survive the war.

  On July 27, 1942, the education of Jewish children was officially outlawed, and private instruction was secretly organized throughout the Protectorate. Helga and her friends were able to continue their education, and, despite the shadows cast by these dismal events and a sense that the walls were closing in on them, she still led something resembling a normal life. But this was not to last much longer.

  In the winter of 1942–43, Helga opened for the first time the diary her father had given her and began to make entries.

  Sunday, January 17, 1943

  I’ve spent my last day in Kyjov, a day of hectic activity. We’ve packed our food in bread sacks and shopping bags. I doubt that my aunt has sat down for a single second today (she doesn’t sit down anyway, even if she’s not preparing to travel). I’m now sitting at my desk. I am very tired. But that doesn’t matter! This is my last day at home, so I have to write about it! Within twelve hours the whole house will be deserted (I will not hang my head; I’m going to leave my home with head held high!). Now I’m going to sleep. I have to get up very early in the morning. I’ll lie down with my clothes on, since I don’t have anything left to cover up with.

  Two days later, when Helga and her family arrived in Uhersky-Brod, she continued her account:

  Tuesday, January 19, 1943

  It was a miserable trip. I got up very early, but only just in time to get ready. I had so many clothes on I could hardly move. We used the sled to get to the train, with Uncle Karl, Maria, and me pulling, and with Papa, Aunt Trude, and Lea sitting on it. So much snow had fallen, we were glad just to make it to the train. We hastily searched for our luggage. Amazingly, there was little commotion. I thought everyone would be a lot more out of control. There wasn’t enough room on the train to sit. My father fell trying to board. Frau Dr. Schönthal (who’s not Jewish) helped him get up. She was sobbing.

  As the train pulled out, we started to sing patriotic Czech songs. A policeman standing beside the train was very touched and walked the whole length of the train wishing every one he knew a safe and happy return. An hour and three quarters later we arrived in Uhersky-Brod. I didn’t have to carry my rucksack there. We loaded it onto a truck. Papa, Trude, and Lea rode along, too.

  By the time we arrived at the high school where we were quartered, I thought I’d collapse. Frau Webschovska brought me to my aunt. We’re lying on mattresses.

  Helga was feeling more and more miserable. The last days in Kyjov, the rigors of a trip in the cold and snow, and the conditions at the assembly camp had completely exhausted her. “It is awful here, probably even worse than in Theresienstadt,” she noted on January 20. “The food makes you want to throw up, and I have a sore throat today. I saw the doctor and he gave me a powder to make me sweat.”

  Helga’s condition grew worse. Early on the morning when they were to travel from Uhersky-Brod to Theresienstadt, her temperature reached 102.2 degrees and the doctor diagnosed tonsillitis. It was in this same condition that Helga arrived at eight o’clock on the morning of January 23 in Bohušovice, from which point they had to march to Theresienstadt, forty-five minutes away. “If the walk had lasted fifteen minutes longer,” she later wrote, “I’m certain I would have collapsed.”

  In Theresienstadt, Helga and her family were assigned to an attic in the Hamburg Barracks, where the exhausted girl was finally able to stretch out on an old mattress on the cold floor. Her eyes closed immediately. She could not and did not want to see anything more that day. After that dreadful journey, here was the terrible reality of the ghetto: ugly old barracks, blocks of unfriendly, virtually indistinguishable buildings, streets laid out in a grid pattern, ditches, trenches, and barricades. And there were so many people—sick, hungry, and emaciated, young and old, all living in miserable quarters.

  Jews arriving in Theresienstadt: Like these deportees, Helga Pollak had to complete the last part of her journey from Bohušovice to Theresienstadt on foot.

  Where had she ended up? What was happening to her? And why?

  CHAPTER THREE

  Daily Life in the Camp

  On January 23, 1943, when Helga, her father, and their relatives arrived in Theresienstadt, th
is northern Bohemian garrison town about thirty miles north of Prague on the Eger River had already served as a concentration and transit camp for Jewish prisoners from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia for more than a year. The previous six months had also seen the arrival of thousands of Jews from other European countries, primarily Germany and Austria.

  One hundred eleven thousand, seven hundred fifty-six men, women, and children had been sent to this place since the first transport of Jewish prisoners arrived on November 24, 1941. Most went on to be deported by the thousands to places farther east. On January 9 and 15, 1942, the first two transports left Theresienstadt for Riga, each carrying 1,000 prisoners, followed by more transports to the extermination camps of Izbica, Piaski, and Sobibór, and to other destinations in Poland. Two thousand prisoners left in March 1942, 7,000 in April, and 3,000 in May. Only 175 people from these transports survived.

  By July 3, 1942, the original population of Theresienstadt had been evacuated completely to make room for new deportees. They came mostly from Germany and Austria, and, as 1943 wore on, also from Denmark and the Netherlands. In September 1942, Theresienstadt’s population swelled to a peak of 58,652—in an area comprising little more than three hundred acres, in a town whose prewar population had numbered about 3,500 civilians plus roughly the same number of soldiers. Barracks that had housed 320 soldiers now had to accommodate more than 4,000 people. The Hamburg Barracks alone held 4,346 people, which came to just over sixteen square feet per person.

  Many people in Theresienstadt died of hunger, illness, heat, or psychological trauma. In July 1942 the average daily death toll was 32. In August it went up to 75, and by September it had climbed to 131, with a high of 156 reached on September 18. The total number of deaths recorded between August and October 1942 was 9,364.

  But death alone, which the Nazis cynically termed “natural decimation,” did not create enough room for all the Jews constantly arriving on new transports. For the SS that was no problem: They simply increased the number of transports from Theresienstadt to the East. Between September 19 and October 22, 1942, ten transports containing 19,004 people, most of them elderly, left Theresienstadt on what were called “old people’s transports.” With the exception of a single individual, they all ended in the Treblinka death camp. Only 3 people from those transports survived the war. After October 26, 1942, nearly all transports led to Auschwitz.

  Of the 50,871 prisoners who had been deported from Theresienstadt to the East during 1942, only 327 would eventually be liberated. Theresienstadt had long since become just a way station on a long journey to death.

  Helga, of course, had no knowledge of any of this when she arrived in Theresienstadt in January 1943, or of the Wannsee Conference in Berlin a year earlier, or of the secret meetings in the Hradschin castle in Prague in October 1941. Not even the adult prisoners, including the members of the Zionist organizations and the leaders of the Jewish community in Theresienstadt, knew anything about these meetings and their purpose: to define precisely the role of Theresienstadt as an “ old-age ghetto,” a “model ghetto,” and a transit camp for further evacuations of the Jews to the East.

  The Jewish leaders in Theresienstadt who formed the Council of Elders worked in the belief that their actions would help ensure the survival of Theresienstadt’s Jews until the end of the war. In doing so, they unwittingly reinforced the Nazi myth that Theresienstadt was an autonomous, democratic, self-governing Jewish settlement. But it quickly became apparent to Jakob Edelstein, the first chief Jewish elder, “just what sort of wind was blowing in the Theresienstadt Ghetto.”1 Edelstein and the other elders were bitterly disillusioned when it became clear that the Nazis had no intention of allowing the Jewish Council to act as anything more than an instrument in the hands of the actual camp administration—the SS commandant’s office under the leadership of Dr. Siegfried Seidl. Indeed, only eight days after Helga’s arrival, Edelstein was abruptly and unexpectedly replaced by Paul Eppstein, the former chairman of the Reich Representation of German Jews in Berlin. Edelstein was demoted to Eppstein’s deputy.

  At the end of the eighteenth century, on the order of the Hapsburg emperor Joseph II, a fortress was built at the confluence of the Elbe and the Eger rivers, about thirty miles north of Prague. The emperor called it Theresienstadt after his mother, the empress Maria Theresa. The fortress was intended to block any advance of the Prussian army on Prague, which was then part of the Austrian Empire. In 1846 the town was given its own municipal government and coat of arms. But by 1888 Theresienstadt was no longer of any strategic military importance, and its designation as a fortress was rescinded. It remained a garrison town, however, with a growing civilian population. After the Nazi occupation of the Sudetenland in October 1938, Terezin (as it was called when the independent republic of Czechoslovakia was formed in 1918) found itself on the border between the so-called rest of Czechia and Germany, and it became a refuge for the waves of people fleeing the Sudetenland. The arrival of the “construction commando” in late November 1941 marked the beginning of the transformation of Terezin (renamed Theresienstadt) into a concentration camp for Jewish prisoners. The building to the right of the church is the Girls’ Home L 410.

  The Girls’ Home L 410 in Theresienstadt. The arrow points to Room 28.

  A few days after her arrival in Theresienstadt, Helga was assigned to live in the Girls’ Home. Having known nothing but disruption in her life over the past few years, she was now going to have to find a place for herself in another new world. “I can still remember it very clearly,” she recalls. “All alone, without my father, carrying my suitcase in my hand, I walked to the Girls’ Home L 410, passing through its ugly entryway. On the ground floor was an office, and someone told me that there was a place available on the third floor, in Room 28. They sent me up on my own. I stood in the doorway, not daring to go inside. I was so self-conscious that I probably sounded brusque when I said, ‘Hello. I am Helga Pollak and I’m supposed to live here.’ ”

  A crowd of girls looked back at her in surprise from every corner of the room, while she stood on the threshold. How did she get here, this strange girl? their eyes seemed to be asking. And why was she sent to us when our room is already overcrowded?

  To this day, Helga relives the memory of the feeling that came over her as she stood there. There was a big lump in her throat. More than anything, she wanted to turn on her heel and walk away. But where would she go? So she just stayed where she was, unmoving and uncertain. “Why there was no counselor to receive me and introduce me to the others, I really don’t know,” she says. “Ordinarily, that’s how it was done. But for some reason that wasn’t the case with me.” Helga is still puzzled by it. “If someone had introduced me, my initiation into Room 28 would definitely have been easier.”

  Finally there was some movement. A young woman who appeared to be just as surprised by Helga’s arrival as were the girls directed her to an open bunk.

  “My suitcase is downstairs. Can anyone help me bring it up?” Helga asked. And, in fact, one of the girls jumped up and helped her carry the heavy suitcase up the three flights of stairs.

  Helga made this sketch of her diary. The entry for March 10, 1943, reads, “I’m longing for Mama now. That’s why I put her photo in my diary, and I imagine that when I’m writing, I’m writing for her.”

  Friday, January 29, 1943

  I’ve moved into the Girls’ Home. It’s a sunny room in a building that previously housed the military administration. The building is next to the church, the windows of the room look out on Market Square. I wish I could gaze out of the window all the time because I can see beautiful mountains. When it’s clear, I can see a cross on top of one, and a castle on top of another.

  The girls haven’t made a good impression on me. When I went downstairs, they told the counselor to make sure I didn’t move in. The counselor tried, but it didn’t do any good. I’m lying on a mattress on the second level of a three-level bunk. It’s all weighing me dow
n. I’m very tired, so I’ll stop writing.

  The feeling of being a stranger weighed upon Helga for quite a long time, and the ease with which the other girls got along only reinforced it. They had evidently known one another for a good while. Some were close friends, some were always at the center of things and set the tone for the room, and others stayed in the background. And there were the troublemakers. Helga was baffled by this tangled network of relationships.

  There was Anna Flach, whom they all called Flaška, a girl with a very outgoing personality. She shared a bunk with Ela Stein, who had black hair and dark eyes and was definitely a vivacious and chatty sort of person. Lenka Lindt, with her gentle expression and her levelheaded way of talking, seemed more mature than the others. Handa Pollak piqued Helga’s interest as well. She was a quiet girl with beautiful dark eyes. Handa had a middle bunk, which she shared with Eva Landa, a strikingly pretty girl from Prague. In the top bunk was lively, blond Eva Winkler.

  Helga quickly realized that she had been given a bad spot—the middle bunk of a triple-decker just to the right of the door. Beside her lay Marta Kende, a pale girl of Hungarian descent. She had a way of letting Helga know that it didn’t suit her to have a new neighbor, and she reacted peevishly if Helga so much as touched an inch or two of her space, which was hard to avoid in this cramped area. Housed in a space of barely 323 square feet were an equal number of girls.

  Two girls who seemed to be the youngest slept on the lowest bunk beside the window: Maria Mühlstein and a girl who was obviously the pet of Room 28. Her name was Ruth Schächter, but everyone called her by her nickname, Zajíček, which means “bunny” in Czech. Helga was surprised to find out that nearly all the girls had nicknames. Eva Fischl answered to Fiška (“Fish”), Ruth Popper to Poppinka, and Anna Flach to Flaška (“Little Bottle”). There was a Didi, Alice Sittig; an Olile, Olga Löwy; and a Rutka, Ruth Gutmann. Many of the nicknames, like Zajíček’s, were taken from the animal realm. There was a girl called Kuře (“Chick”) and one called Prasátko (“Piglet”). Next to Marianne Deutsch, who was usually called Marianka, lay little Hana Epstein, who went by Holubička (“Dove”).