The Girls of Room 28

by Hannelore Brenner

  The Winklers were also thinking of leaving. They were weighing the idea of Montevideo, and also of putting Eva on a children’s transport to England. But these plans came to naught, in large part because their sawmill in Miroslav had been Aryanized and all their assets confiscated.

  In March 1939, when the Germans occupied Brno and the rest of the Czech lands, everything was as it had been in Miroslav. Eva’s grandparents’ sawmill and assets were seized. Close neighbors turned out to be vicious Nazis, and even the supervisor in their building suddenly showed up in a brown shirt. “We were afraid of these people.”

  Eva and her family moved a total of four times, until finally they were living in one room of a small apartment, which they had to share with other families. It was there that she often got together with a friend she had made in Brno—Flaška. There was still some space for children to play in Flaška’s apartment at Adler Gasse 13, and they made use of it as often as possible.

  Then the transports began. The eleven thousand Jews of Brno were summoned in alphabetical order. Flaška was on one of the very first lists. By April 1942, it was the letter W’s turn, and the Winkler family began the journey early on a cool Sunday morning.

  “Why a Sunday? Why so early in the morning?” Eva asks, when describing that day years later. “Because most people were still asleep at that hour. Because there was no one on the street, no one to see us moving through the streets loaded with our backpacks, on the long walk to the Brno school that served as the assembly point. Only the SS guards watched us closely, some of them young fellows who mocked and laughed at us. And my father said to them, and I can still hear him even today, ‘Just wait. One day those grins will be wiped right off your faces.’ ”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Appearance and Reality

  December 21, 1943, was the day on which Hanukkah actually fell, but no one was in the mood to celebrate. And yet who would want the flame of hope to go out? After all, Hanukkah is the festival of hope. It commemorates the uprising in 165 B.C.E. in the Land of Israel of the Maccabees against the occupying Syrian Greeks, and the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem (Hanukkah is Hebrew for “dedication”) following its desecration by the occupiers. Just enough purified oil was left to light the menorah, the Temple’s candelabra, for one day. But a miracle occurred: The menorah burned for eight days, during which time new oil could be produced, and the flame was kept alive.

  As 1943 drew to a close, the question of whether there could still be miracles was often asked in Theresienstadt. Most everyone believed that there could be. What would be the point of maintaining the opposite? But there were also some pessimists among the girls. The following verse can be found in Handa’s notebook:

  Pessimists live by one rule—

  The optimist’s mood must be spoiled.

  But the optimists smile and wonder instead:

  Might it be true? Might it yet happen?

  The scowling pessimists reverse the case

  And laugh in every optimistic face.

  Otto Pollak was an optimist; there was no doubt about it. Before an assembly gathered to celebrate Hanukkah at the Home for Invalids he read from a collection of poems titled Songs of the Ghetto by Maurice Rosenfeld. Helga, he reports in his own calendar diary, “listened wide-eyed.”

  “I am really proud of Papa,” Helga wrote that same evening. “I just heard him read poems aloud for the first time—and so beautifully! It was at the Hanukkah celebration at the Home for Invalids, which lasted until nine o’clock. I couldn’t stay past eight-thirty. Papa read three very beautiful Jewish poems with such liveliness—Papa is a treasure. Not because I received gifts from him—a little notebook with a picture of a menorah on the front and a velvet cover for my diary—but because Papa has reminded me that it is Hanukkah, even here in Theresienstadt.”

  Three days later Helga was lying in sick bay with encephalitis; the old year passed into the new without any fanfare. On January 5, Helga, along with Hana Lissau and Ruth Gutmann, was transferred to the Sokolovna, the former clubhouse of the Sokol Athletic Club. It was a very busy place.

  Wednesday, January 5, 1944

  Today is my first day in the Sokolovna. I have encephalitis, or sleeping sickness, a kind of brain flu. I’ve been sick for ten days now and spent the whole time in sick bay. There are so many cases that one of the rooms in the Home had to be cleared to accommodate them. It was really awful there. The door wouldn’t close, the windows were broken, the blinds ripped, the stove wouldn’t heat, and there was a thick layer of dust everywhere. No one looked after us because it wasn’t a real sick bay. It was just so that we could be isolated from the healthy children. I am so happy to be here now.

  The Sokolovna, which before the war had been the clubhouse of the Sokol (Czech for “falcon”) Athletic Club

  Thursday, January 6, 1944

  The Sokolovna is a beautiful, modern building full of laboratories. The former gym is now the sick bay for all encephalitis cases. There are four rows of beds, with twenty patients in each row. Each row has its own doctor. One doctor and one nurse are on duty at night. There are five or six nurses during the day. When Pfeiffer, the head doctor, makes his rounds, he’s joined by four other doctors and all the nurses.

  They wake us at six o’clock and take temperatures. At nine the doctor in charge makes his rounds, and at eleven the head doctor makes his. This afternoon Prof. Sittig, a nerve specialist, came to examine the new patients. We new arrivals are lying just outside the ward in a separate room with only nine beds.

  We are all in love with Dr. Herling, the physician assigned to us, but it’s hopeless because he’s already married. He’s so handsome and dashing. He has a very special smile, probably because he knows we all have a crush on him.

  During visiting hours today we were allowed out on the balcony and I spoke to Papa from the second floor.

  The next day Helga passed a little note to her father—let down from the terrace at the end of long thread. No visitors were allowed inside the Sokolovna, so there was always a crowd outside the building during visiting hours. Naturally, there was a loud muddle of voices, and it would have been impossible for Helga to shout everything she wanted to say to her father.

  The note that Helga let down to her father on a thread from the terrace of the Sokolovna

  January 6, 1944

  Dear Papa,

  We’re finally here. It’s nice here and the main thing is: it’s CLEAN here. The girls who were already in the Sokolovna were so happy to see us—it’s a miracle that they didn’t hug us to death. We had to bathe and wash our hair. There was a concert in the evening. Someone played the violin and someone else an accordion. They played Dvořák’s Humoresque, Poem by Fibich, a medley of songs from the operetta Gypsy Princess, plus some Czech folk songs. They ended the concert with Gounod’s Ave Maria.

  Nine o’clock is lights-out. My blanket is so heavy that I thought I’d end up flat as a pancake by morning.

  I’m lying next to Ruth Gutmann. She’s a great girl from our room. I had already laid beside her in 17a [the sick bay at the Girls’ Home]. We’ve become fond of each other since that time. Please, write me, I’m a little afraid here. I’m reading a book in German now: The Jewish Millionaires.

  When I look out the window I can see the Sudeten Barracks and a barbed wire fence. It looks as if I’m right at the border. Everything is covered with snow, and I can see forests and mountains in the distance. There’s a guardhouse and a policeman stationed at the fence.

  When Hana Lissau was discharged on January 10, Helga moved to the vacant bed beside Eva Heller. Eva also came from Vienna and, like Helga, had been taken in 1938 to Czechoslovakia, where she lived with her aunt in Brno until her deportation. Her parents had fled to Palestine and, like Zajíček’s parents, they had hoped to have their daughter follow later. But it hadn’t worked out, and Eva remained with her aunt, who treated her like her own daughter.

  A deep friendship developed between Helga and Eva Heller
. The two of them founded a “commune,” shared their food and anything they got, and occasionally buried themselves in the books that were passed around the Sokolovna: Quo Vadis, The Microbe Hunters, and Pierrot, Francis Kozik’s biography of the French mime Caspar Debureau. Sometimes they did handicrafts with the help of a girl in a nearby bed, making little dolls out of rags, wire, and yarn. Helga gave her first creation to her father. “In case you don’t recognize it, he’s supposed to be a sailor, and that’s an accordion he’s holding.” For her cousin Lea she put together a snowman, and for Trude a girl in winter clothing, in a dark blue dress with a muff, a cap, and a scarf.

  And so the days passed with naps, chatting, reading, handicrafts, and visits by the doctors. The fears and anxieties that sometimes faded away during the day hit doubly hard at night: “Every day the actress tells me what I did in my sleep; that she tucked me in like a little child and that I scream a lot. Today I was lying with my head on Eva’s stomach, and she woke up because she couldn’t breathe. What’s the political news? Write and tell me. I would so love to see Mama even for just a little while.”

  Illness still held Helga in its clutches. “I have a real encephalitis head. I forget everything. I go to the bathroom and suddenly realize I don’t know why I went there. It is so bad that when I write to you and put my pencil aside for a second, I fall asleep at once. I hope that I can come home in a week or two. I couldn’t write to Mařenka yesterday because my eyes hurt too much.”

  January was drawing to a close, and there was still a blanket of snow when Helga was finally released. “Left Marta at three-thirty to see Mimi,” Otto Pollak noted. “A marvelous surprise when I got to House L 410—Helga came shooting out the door. She’s been released from the Sokolovna. She wanted to surprise me by playing her little trick. When I visited her yesterday she said the doctors were figuring it would be two weeks yet before the infection was gone. With a cry of Tati! she hugged me and smothered me with kisses.”

  February 20, 1944, was, as Otto Pollak recorded enthusiastically in his diary, “the most beautiful winter day of the year. No fog, no clouds, an azure sky, cold, but with a wonderfully bright winter sun, and with freshly fallen snow thawing on Monte Terezino.”1 News from the front indicated that the Germans were suffering huge losses on a daily basis. At the start of the month, according to the bonkes making the rounds of the ghetto, fifty-four hundred airplanes were involved in a maneuver in North Africa, and the roar could be heard all across the south of France. “They were American and English planes,” Helga confided to her diary in code, reversing all the letters of the sentence.

  In the meantime, a new girl, Miriam Rosenzweig, had moved into Room 28. She shared a bunk with Hanka Wertheimer. The two had become acquainted in the Dresden Barracks, where Hanka’s grandmother and Miriam’s mother shared a room. Hanka liked this blond girl who was, like herself, a member of the Zionist organization Tekhelet-Lavan. Their pleasure in spending time together quickly grew into a friendship that was deepened at the meetings of Hanka’s little Zionist group, Dror, which Miriam also joined.

  Miriam had long been familiar with Room 28. She had regularly attended Friedl Dicker-Brandeis’s painting classes there. And she also loved to join in the girls’ other activities, because there was usually something interesting going on in Room 28. The latest rage was scouting.

  By this time a group of girls had joined with the boys in Room 9 to form a scouting troop. Inspired by The Boys from Beavers’ River, a book by Jaroslav Foglar, they called themselves the Beavers. The Beavers were divided into teams: the Wolves, the Sharpshooters, the Foxes, and the Lions, each with its own flag and battle cry. “With lionlike strength we pounce like the king of beasts. Forward, young Lions, forward, ahoy, ahoy!” was the cry of the Lions, the group that Helga had halfheartedly joined. “At first I didn’t want to join the scouts,” she noted, “because I know how it always turns out when our girls do anything together with these guys. Many of them don’t take the whole thing seriously—they just want to be around the boys. But then I reconsidered and joined the group, because I do love nature.”

  When Helga heard that a couple of the girls intended to organize parties with the boys, though, she regretted her decision. “Yuck! Dancing, body against body. The smell of sweat and makeup. I’m against it. This isn’t allowed according to scouting rules.”

  Judith Schwarzbart was in total agreement with her. Weren’t there enough scouting activities—like not speaking for a day, or not eating all day, or not laughing, even when others did everything they could to make you laugh? What was all this to-do about boys? Some girls were now also suggesting ideas for future parties: a sketch, a game, something amusing. Had their comrades gone completely crazy?

  Others saw the funny side of the matter. Handa and Fiška used this opportunity to write what they called an “ironic song.” It can be found in Handa’s notebook:

  One day Gelbec [Honza Gelbkopf] came to us and said: “I’m supposed to tell you that our scout troop will be meeting this afternoon.” He was hardly out the door when everyone began shouting, “Hurrah! There’ll be lots of boys there!” Lenka: “Which blouse should I wear? This one’s all wrinkled, and my best skirt has a big spot on it.” “So what?” one of the girls said. “Why are you always going on about your blouse!” “Lenka, calm down. It’s not important.” Lenka: “But I’ve got to look good because my boyfriend will see me there.” Another girl: “You’re so silly. Gelbec isn’t even your boyfriend anymore. So don’t try that on us, and stop worrying about your outfit all the time.”

  The next day the stillness of Home 9 was broken by a deep sigh. “Who would like to exchange 2 ounces of margarine for Ela? She jabbers so much I don’t even like her anymore.” And one of the boys says, “You don’t think I’m crazy, do you? I can eat margarine. But what can I do with Ela?”

  Suddenly Chamičurgl’s bald head comes into view. And he raises one finger and says menacingly, “Gelbec, I’m warning you. You stick with Ela, or I’ll make mincemeat of you.”

  Although Judith and Helga both loved to laugh and were amused by such foolishness, they could not make heads or tails of the excitement this partnership with the boys in Home 9 was occasioning among their roommates. “For all I care this scouting thing can fall apart. It’s really just silly stuff with boys, and it has no deeper meaning at all,” Helga told her diary. “Ma’agal full speed ahead would be better.” Or education. “I’ve been unfaithful to you, haven’t I?” reads her entry for February 24. “But I really haven’t had any time to write. I have so much to learn if I want to stay in group A. I was second in geography with a grade of 95, and in history I had a 100, and Hana Lissau and I are the best in the class. We have a new teacher in Czech, a regular Xanthippe. She taught the eighth grade. Things are getting lost here. Tella is carrying out a search to find out why.”

  Something quite shocking was happening in Room 28. Bread, margarine, sugar, and even buns and dumplings kept disappearing somewhere along the way from the children’s kitchen to the Home. “I’ll never forget that moment,” little Frta, Marta Fröhlich, recalls. “I was a suspect! And then two more buns disappeared, and two girls would have to go without lunch. They searched everywhere and took my bunk apart, but didn’t find anything. Then the counselors came up with a plan. Before our meal all the girls had to go down to the courtyard, and a counselor hid behind the curtain of our closet. The counselor who accompanied the girls getting the food placed the bucket in view of the hidden counselor. We were called in for our meal. And two buns were missing again. ‘That just isn’t possible!’ I can still hear it today. And suddenly a girl pointed at me and said, ‘She’s blushing. It’s probably her.’ I started to cry. It was horrible. It wasn’t me, and it was such an awful feeling. It weighed on me for a long, long time, even after the war. The counselors insisted that the thief confess and admit what she had done. But no one stepped forward. Since two portions for our noon meal were missing again, there was an inspection. They searched eve
rywhere now, in our blankets, which we always kept rolled up, and what do you know—two buns appeared! They were not in my things, but no one apologized to me. They probably thought it didn’t matter if you make life difficult for such a stupid girl.”

  The story about the pilfering cut Marta to the quick. Had it not been for Eva Eckstein, their new counselor, she would have had a hard time getting over it. But Eva kindly took her under her wing. She sensed that Marta was not held in high regard by Tella, and she didn’t want to make her life any more difficult than it already was. She herself had reservations about Tella. “I always had the feeling that whatever I did wasn’t enough. She also pointed out to me that Eva Weiss did everything better than I did.”

  Eva Eckstein was born in Louny on November 7, 1924. She arrived in Theresienstadt in February 1942 and began working on the cleaning crew. Then, during the hard winter of 1942–43, she was assigned to a commando in the forests of Křivoklát. After Eichmann’s visit to Theresienstadt in April 1943, tents were set up in Market Square as a place to assemble crates for the army, and Eva was assigned to this “essential war production.” In the wake of the transports of December 1943 and with the help of her friend Kamilla Rosenbaum, she was transferred to work in Youth Welfare.

  Eva Eckstein was nineteen and more emotionally connected to the girls than Tella. She treated her wards with great kindness, especially Marta, whom she often took along when she visited her mother and two sisters. Marta had finally found someone who offered her trust and maternal affection, and who helped restore her self-confidence. Eva did her best to make life easier for the children. “The time I spent in Room 28,” she would say half a century later, “was the best part of my stay in Theresienstadt.”