The Girls of Room 28

by Hannelore Brenner

  “As the former director and founder of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, I followed the artistic work of Fräulein Dicker with great interest,” wrote Walter Gropius in 1931 in a letter of recommendation for his former student. In that same year, in addition to her work in her design firm, Atelier Singer-Dicker, in Vienna, she also began her career as an art instructor for kindergartens. “During this period she always distinguished herself by her unusual and extraordinary artistic talent and thus attracted the attention of the entire faculty to her work. The variety of her talents and her great energy resulted in accomplishments and works that were among the very best of the institute.”6

  Indeed, numerous objects bear witness to her inexhaustible creative energies: posters, invitations, book designs, embroidered pieces, set and costume designs (for Berthold Viertel and Bertolt Brecht, among others), drawings, paintings, sculpture, furniture, interior designs, and photo collages. These works of art were created during her student days, in the Werkstätten Bildender Kunst (Workshop for Fine Arts) in Berlin, which she had opened together with fellow student and friend Franz Singer in 1923, and, from 1926 to 1931, in Vienna in the Atelier Singer-Dicker, whose renown soon spread well beyond that city.

  Beginning in 1933, the changing times began to make themselves felt in Friedl’s life. Sometime during the February 1934 uprising in Vienna, which resulted in several hundred casualties and imprisonments, Friedl was arrested for being a member of the banned Communist Party. Released from prison that same year, she fled to Prague, where she remained until 1938. These years were marked by two crucial turning points in her life. In the aftermath of her imprisonment and flight, and after having broken off a complicated longtime love affair with her professional partner, Franz Singer, Friedl underwent a period of introspection and inner withdrawal. Her new orientation found its artistic expression in a series of new paintings—portraits, landscapes, still lifes, cityscapes—that announced her emancipation from the influences of the Bauhaus and the development of her own unique style. On a personal level, it also led to a new partnership with Pavel Brandeis, whom she married in 1936.

  Following her inclination to work with children, Friedl set up a children’s art studio in her apartment in Prague. It was attended mainly by children of German-speaking Prague families and by children of emigrants from Germany and Austria, among them Georg Eisler, son of the composer Hanns Eisler. One of Friedl’s most talented students was Edith Kramer, who had moved to Prague from Vienna in order to stay close to her teacher and master. At the age of twenty she became Friedl’s assistant. “I knew that I couldn’t learn nearly as much from anyone else as from Friedl. She was an inspired and wonderful teacher,” she would later say of her mentor.7

  Friedl’s circle grew smaller with each passing day. More and more friends were saying farewell. She herself could have emigrated; she had a certificate from Palestine in hand. But she didn’t want to leave her husband and his family. “I cannot go,” she said when saying goodbye to her friend Wally Fischer. “Theoretically I could leave for Palestine tomorrow. But I have a task to do here, Wally. I have to stay, no matter what happens.”8

  It is difficult to say today how she conceived this task. We know only one thing: Friedl, who so desperately wanted a child, had a miscarriage during that time. This trauma might have led her to think that she was not meant to be a mother of a single child, but rather a teacher of art to many children.

  “I believe,” Edith Kramer would later say, “that it worked to the benefit of the children of Theresienstadt that she herself did not have a child. Otherwise she would have found a way to save herself. And the children of Theresienstadt would never have had those wonderful experiences with her.”

  In the summer of 1938, Friedl and Pavel moved to Hronov, a small town northeast of Prague, near the Polish border. They managed to lead a modest life there. And Friedl, though not used to life in a provincial town, enjoyed the picturesque surroundings, which became a source of new energy for her.

  “This life has ransomed me from a thousand deaths by allowing me to paint with earnest diligence, and it is as if I have freed myself from some guilt whose cause I do not know,” she wrote to a girlfriend shortly after arriving in Hronov9 Friedl threw herself into her painting with the utmost intensity. She painted to combat the suffering in this world and her own personal pain, creating her most beautiful, most personal works. “In those dark gloomy days,” an acquaintance from the period reports, “she radiated energy, wisdom, and cordiality—emotions that seemed to come from another world and had almost been forgotten at the time. … And she was always drawing. Even while she was preparing supper she would sit at the window and draw, not wanting to waste a single minute.”10

  On December 9, 1940, Friedl wrote to her friend Hilde Kothny in Germany: “I have slipped through the net and am gratefully enjoying life. I only hope that if I have to pay for this, I will have stored up enough energy from it to do so.”11

  In December 1942 Friedl and Pavel received their transport orders. Composed and prepared for what was in store for her, she started on her way to Theresienstadt.

  Helga’s diary continues:

  Wednesday, November 3, 1943

  Ela cried. I could not at all believe that she’s so fond of me and loyal to me and valued our friendship so much. I’m well aware that my friendship with Erika was a disappointment to her. But how should I have known that she and Flaška aren’t such close friends, that they only go to their rendezvous together because their boyfriends are pals and that’s why they all go for their evening walk together? Flaška and Zajíček have exchanged friendship rings, and now Flaška also has friendship pendants with Hana Lissau and Eva Heller. Zajíček has left Flaška, just as Pavla once left Ela and I’m leaving Ela now. Flaška is all alone. Ela is all alone—her friends have betrayed her. Marianne doesn’t have a friend, but she gets along well with Ela and Flaška. They’re friendly with one another, but haven’t offered each other real friendship. I told Ela just now that I’ll always think of her as my best friend, even if she no longer wants it that way. I offered her my friendship again, to which she replied that she’d have to think it over seriously. I’m curious how it will turn out.

  We lie packed together like sardines on our triple-decker bunks. Between the stench, the narrow confines, and the vermin, it’s really terrible here. I’ve drawn a sketch of our bed, where two people lie on each level. We sleep in our beds, and live and eat in them like monkeys in a tree or chickens in a henhouse.

  November 11, 1943, was a day of fear—a cold, gray, rainy day. The evening before, an order had been given for everyone living in the ghetto to report the following day for a census to be taken two miles from Theresienstadt, in a low area just outside of Bohušovice that the Czechs called kotlina, the “hollow.” The order had been preceded by the arrest of the deputy Jewish elder, Jakob Edelstein, and three of his colleagues from the Central Registry, the office assigned to keep a precise record of all arriving and departing transports and an accurate daily count of the population. The arrested men, who vanished into the camp prison in the cellar of the bank building, were accused of falsifying records and abetting the flight of at least fifty-five people.

  In fact, it had become the practice among the Central Registry staff to occasionally enter the names of dead persons on transport lists in order to protect some people from being deported to the East. Sometimes births (beginning in 1943, abortions were obligatory)12 were covered up by falsely entering the names of dead persons in the registry. And they attempted to hide the names of people who had fled the camp by listing them in the daily count as still present.

  After several prisoners, including Walter Deutsch, had escaped from Theresienstadt that October and were later arrested in Prague, the SS examined the records and, discovering all sorts of irregularities, sent some of those responsible to the camp prison. These events were known only to a small circle, and if the majority of the ghetto residents did learn of them, it was only by w
ay of dubious bonkes. But there could be no mistake about the meaning of the orders issued for November 11, 1943.

  Beds in Room 28—a drawing from Helga’s diary

  Everyone had to get up at five o’clock in the morning and make themselves ready for the march. Soon afterward the ghetto’s inhabitants were streaming from its buildings and barracks: between thirty and forty thousand people, from babies to ninety-year-olds, mothers holding their children’s hands, some with a baby in a carriage, the sick on crutches, the frail clutching canes or clinging to someone younger. Row upon row, the crowd moved forward, some of them in panic because they feared the worst, others apparently more composed even while they tried to calm themselves with the notion that this was just another absurd Nazi torment that they would have to endure.

  “I didn’t sleep at all during the night of November 10th,” Helga confided to her diary ten days later, after removing it from its hiding place. “First came the Home elder, then the doctor, then the nurse—and it was all about the census to be taken in the Bohušovice Hollow. We got up at five, had to put on the warmest clothes we had, and by half past seven we were required to be at the door and ready to march. We stood there for an hour, then we were sent back into the Home, only to be whistled for again ten minutes later and ordered to march back downstairs and line up out on the street. There were three hundred fifty children. Then we walked for forty-five minutes to the hollow. We had enough to eat with us, because that same morning we had been given our ration of three ounces of sugar, a pound of bread, half a tin of liverwurst, and two ounces of margarine. We stood in one spot from ten in the morning until five that evening.”

  “We were with the children,” the counselor Eva Weiss recalls. “And we thought up games to play. Word games or the sort of guessing games you play with children when you don’t have anything else, just to divert them and lessen their fear. But the whole time we were afraid they would shoot us. We didn’t know if we would be coming back.”

  Today, the children who were under her care have no recollection of playing any games in the kotlina. Only a few of them managed to remember how they formed a little circle, facing outward, so that a friend could go to the toilet. Much stronger are memories of how cold it was, the pain in their frozen hands and feet, and how their legs hurt from standing for hours in one place. And they all share one memory burned forever in their minds—fear.

  “I was terribly afraid,” Flaška recalls. “I thought they were going to shoot us. The whole valley was surrounded by armed police and SS men, with airplanes circling overhead.”

  “I wanted to find my mother and grandmother, but that wasn’t possible. We weren’t allowed to leave our group,” Hanka says. And Handa remembers, “No one knew why we were there or what was going to happen next. And under those conditions you think of all sorts of possibilities. The worst part of that day for us was that we really didn’t know if we would be returning home or what would happen next. We thought we would never return to the camp. It was a trauma for us all.”

  In the crowd were Alice Herz-Sommer and her little boy, Stephan, who sometimes played the sparrow in Brundibár. She sat on a blanket that she had brought and laid out on the damp, cold ground, with Stephan on one knee and another boy on the other. She told the two boys stories—how else was she to counter their anxiety, how else to make light of their questions of “why”? Why did they have to stand around here in the rain and cold? Why couldn’t they go back to the ghetto? Alice told stories to fight against the increasing tension; she even managed to make the children laugh. And then suddenly came another booming command from the SS: “Line up in groups of one hundred!” In the distance Anton Burger, the camp commandant, could be seen riding a black horse. A few gliders were drifting overhead, several SS men on bicycles were circling the large area filled with prisoners, Czech policemen held machine guns aimed at the crowd. Dogs were barking, whips cracked. Shots could be heard in the distance. What was happening to those left behind in the ghetto? It was late afternoon, and dusk was falling.

  Suddenly the eerie rumor spread that it all might end in a mass execution by firing squad, or through some other kind of liquidation. Those who had lived in the ghetto since January 1942 recalled in horror the execution of the young men whom the SS made a point of hanging before the eyes of the members of the Council of Elders as punishment for their having tried to smuggle letters out of the camp.13 The camp commandant wanted to set an example that would deter anyone else from disobeying camp rules. Was this so-called census in the Buhošovice Hollow merely a pretense for assembling everyone in order to murder them? An act of reprisal for some acts of disobedience? An act of revenge taken in the manner of the massacre at Lidice?

  The Germans were capable of anything. For those who were older, November 11 was a date that awakened the ghosts of the past. In Berlin on November 9, 1918, the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann had proclaimed Germany a republic. And November 11, 1918, marked the signing of the armistice agreement that later led to the Treaty of Versailles, which in the eyes of the Nazis had brought “disgrace and shame on Germany for all time.” Ever since the early 1920s, these dates had been thorns in the side of all enemies of the Weimar Republic, especially Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party, which was why they had repeatedly unleashed their hatred and thirst for power on their anniversaries. Their failed putsch in Munich occurred on November 9, 1923. And Kristallnacht—the pogroms unleashed against Jews throughout the German Reich, which by then included the Sudetenland—began on the night of November 9, 1938. The events of that night now lay five years in the past. But for those standing in the Buhošovice Hollow, those events were once again real and menacing.

  “So I picked my boy up and held him tight, even though that was rather difficult,” Alice Herz-Sommer continues in her report. “And now the moment was here. We are going to be shot. This is the end. Life is over. Yes, and how does a person react in such a situation? One does not react at all. There is no way to react. Your own emotional life is no longer functional. It is more like a dark wall. Everything is black. The only thing I could feel was the warm body of my son. And I told myself, Well, he’s here with me. Whatever happens to me happens to him. And that lies in God’s hand.”14

  As the day drew to a close, people—especially the elderly—began falling to the ground in exhaustion, some of them fainting, others still quite conscious and yet incapable of staying on their feet. Many younger people were barely able to hold out, either, and—without arousing the notice of the police or SS men who were pacing along their ranks and bellowing numbers—they took turns slipping to the back of their groups of one hundred, where they could crouch down and relax their exhausted bodies for a few minutes. Several more hours passed. It was growing dark and still they were being held in check. When would this nightmare end?

  Little Frta, Marta Fröhlich, was ill with bronchitis and in the infirmary in the Hohenelbe Barracks, so she did not have to appear for the census in the kotlina, as was the case with several hundred other patients. Many of them, especially the old and frail, had been brought to the hospital early that morning. The hospital was overcrowded, and there was so little room that even those who were seriously ill not only had to share a cot with others, but many of them could not even stretch out and had to sit up. There they huddled, shoulder to shoulder, the entire day. Including Marta: “Sick as I was, I sat on my cot from morning to night. I couldn’t even go to the toilet. They just kept counting us over and over—like cows. I heard airplanes and I heard shots, and I thought we would all be shot.”

  As the hours passed, her feverish thoughts were with her brothers and sisters in the kotlina. It seemed like an eternity. “What are the Germans up to? If only I could be with my brothers and sisters! If they shoot them, then I want to be shot, too.”

  “And then something happened that I will never forget,” Alice Herz-Sommer recalls. “A loud cry, in Czech: ‘Zpět do ghetta! Back to the ghetto!’ There’s no describing the feeling. The ghetto had
become paradise. The ghetto, that indescribable ghetto, that hell—in that moment it became paradise!”

  Zdeněk Ohrenstein, the boy from Prague who had played the dog in Brundibár (and who later went by Ornest, the Czech version of his surname), described these events in an article for Vedem: “A great rush, as if a rope had slackened and everything gave way. People moved forward. No one knew who had given the order, but everyone started to walk. Like a slowly churning—and deadly—avalanche. Pushing and shoving. Loud cries. People ruthlessly trampling each other. Everyone just thinking of himself. Me, nobody else! My life is at stake. We rolled back to the barracks, which then stood in our way. This horde of people became one great mob. You couldn’t breathe, and everything stood still. Each was carried along, scarcely aware even of himself. The strength and force of the individual no longer counted. There was only one awful force, the force of the mob, unstoppable and cruel. Yes, so it was—and yet we managed to get home. No one knows precisely how. Everyone fled, leaving everyone else behind. We escaped like flies from a spider-web, our faces expressing only bafflement.”

  At nine o’clock the girls reached their Home. Flaška had fainted from exhaustion on the way back and had to be carried for a while. But that was harmless in comparison to those who were so old and weak that they did not survive this day of absurd census taking, or who later died from its rigors.

  When the girls got back to “their” Room 28, Strejda (Handa’s father) was already kneeling at the old stove. The fire was burning and spreading comforting warmth. Without a word, the girls took to their beds and fell asleep at once.