The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope, and Survival in Theresienstadt

by Hannelore Brenner-Wonschick; Hannelore Brenner

  That year, Helga could hardly wait for summer vacation to begin. She usually spent it with her father’s family in Kyjov, near the Austrian border. There, in a stately house on Market Square, lived her grandmother Sophie, together with her father’s sister, Aunt Marta, Marta’s husband, Uncle Fritz, and their two children, Trude and Josef, whom everyone called Joši. Trude was fifteen, and Joši was twelve. Helga would play with them and the neighborhood children in the big yard behind the house, where there were chickens, a rabbit hutch, and a large shed with all sorts of tools.

  More than ever, Helga found her thoughts racing ahead to the summer. Kyjov was an enticing adventure; even the little shop that Aunt Marta ran in the house was great fun. “There were all sorts of intriguing things there: sewing needles, sweaters, toys, baby carriages. At Christmas she displayed dolls in the shop window, and in the storage room in the back, the boxes of dolls were stacked to the ceiling—one doll prettier than the next. Sometimes my aunt would tell me to pick one out. That made me happy—for me, Kyjov was a magical place.”

  This was true in 1938 as well. Helga spent the last lovely summer of her childhood there. Then, at the end of August, her mother came to see her, bringing two momentous decisions along with her baggage. In view of the disastrous events befalling the Jews of Austria, Helga’s parents had decided that she would stay for a while with their relatives in Kyjor. But because she did not speak any Czech, she would have to attend the German school in Brno and live there during the school year—on her own, in a boardinghouse if need be. Frieda tried to make her eight-year-old daughter understand that this was for her own good: to keep her safe from the persecutions in Vienna, and to ensure that she continued to receive a good education so she would have a good future.

  A few days later, mother and daughter left for Brno. Once Frieda had the feeling that Helga would be well taken care of at the boardinghouse, she bid her goodbye. “You’re a smart girl, you’ll manage,” she said, trying to instill courage in her daughter. And with that, she left. What had begun as a carefree summer vacation turned into an exile.

  Helga spent the ensuing days in a state of apathy. If someone addressed her, she was unable to reply. Even if she had been able to speak Czech, she could not have explained her predicament, because she did not understand it herself. She began to sink into a deep depression.

  Informed of this by the owners of the boardinghouse, Helga’s father, with the help of his relatives in Kyjov, quickly found a family to take her in, but nothing really changed for Helga. “The Wittmanns were a distinguished family, living in a beautiful apartment. They were really very kind to me. But I always felt like a stranger. And I wasn’t allowed to speak with their fourteen-year-old daughter. I wasn’t even allowed in her room to play with her toys.”

  About two weeks later, someone near and dear to her finally arrived. Her cousin Joši came for a visit with one of his friends, and the two boys took Helga to the movies. As they were saying goodbye, Helga burst into tears. How she longed to go back with them to Kyjov! Luckily, when Joši returned home, he convinced his parents to send a telegram to Helga’s father in Vienna, telling him about Helga’s distress.

  The very next day, Otto Pollak took the train to Brno. “It was a beautiful day; the sun was shining. My father’s visit came as a complete surprise. No one had said a word to me. I can see him before me, sitting on a park bench, trying to decide what he should do, while I did my best to persuade him to take me back to Kyjov.”

  That evening, Otto wrote a letter to Helga’s mother.

  Brno, September 11, 1938

  Dear Frieda,

  … Frau Wittmann went upstairs to announce my arrival to Helga. An indescribable cry of joy echoed through the stairwell. Helga, in a new summer dress, white shoes, and stockings, ran down the steps toward me.

  There are no words for our joy at seeing each other again. Frau Wittmann left us alone. Helga stood in front of me and said with a serious look on her sweet young face: “I’ve been thinking, Papa, that the moment you stood before me I would tell you that I don’t want to stay here any longer. I just want to be in Vienna with my parents or in Kyjov with Aunt Marta.”

  There is no describing the mature and collected way the eight-year-old little imp had thought things through, and the depth of soul she revealed.

  Tears kept coming to her eyes, and as I sat down out in front of the house she said to me: “For all I care they can take away all the parks in Vienna. I’d rather be at home just spinning in circles in a corner of my room than running around in a park here. When Mama left, I tried hard not to cry so that she wouldn’t be so sad on the train. But I cried afterwards.”

  When I told her that Ilse Kalinhof had gone to Palestine, she declared that she’d rather be a little beggar girl traveling the world with her parents than a rich girl living with strangers. She asked about Helga Weiss, and said: “She’s lucky; she can be with her parents.”

  Then she told me that Joši had visited her and that she couldn’t help crying when they said goodbye. And when I asked whether Joši had cried, too, she said that he was very sad, but that he hadn’t ever had to live with strangers.

  It went on like that for hours. It took everything in my power to stand firm when she begged me to make a decision. I shall wait a few days so that I can figure out in peace and quiet, rather than in the heat of the moment, what measures to take regarding the future of this extraordinary child. I sat in the dark outside the house with a heavy heart and gazed for a long time up at the brightly lit window of what I assumed was the room of my girl, who means everything to me …

  Warmest wishes, your Otto

  Two days later, the decision had been made. “We took a taxi all the way from Brno to Kyjov—I was overjoyed! I bounced up and down until my head banged against the roof of the car—that’s how happy I was! I can still see the landscape as it passed by us.”

  Because of the language barrier, Helga had to repeat the second grade. But she didn’t care. She was glad to be with her relatives again. She learned Czech easily, made rapid progress in school, and soon felt very much at home in Kyjov.

  Postcard from Frieda Pollak to her daughter Helga: “Ostende, March 25, 1939. My darling little girl! In an hour this beautiful little ship will take me across to England. You will soon be making the same journey, and then you will be just as happy as I am now. A thousand kisses for my darling and my warmest greetings to your dear Aunt Marta, Grandma, Uncle Fritz, Uncle Karl, Marienka, Trudel and Joši. Your Mama.”

  Under the care of her relatives, Helga barely noticed the menacing events that were brewing in Europe. She was too young to grasp the impact of the disastrous Munich Agreement signed by Germany, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom in September 1938, followed by Hitler’s occupation of the Sudetenland, a predominantly German-speaking area on the fringes of Czechoslovakia.2 And she could not see the imminent danger in the German army’s advance into the vicinity of Kyjov. But she did notice that with each passing day people were becoming increasingly restless and frightened.

  When, on March 15, 1939, the Wehrmacht formally occupied the so-called rest of Czechia and set up what they called the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, not much changed for Helga and her family right away. Far more dispiriting was a postcard she received from her mother, who was on her way to England.

  On June 21, 1939, the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Race Laws, which had been enacted in Germany on September 15, 1935, were instituted in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia as well, and Helga was becoming increasingly caught up in the fate from which her parents had tried so desperately to shield her. But there were still ways to leave the country. Jewish organizations such as Hechalutz and Youth Aliyah offered agricultural training abroad and thus managed to help young people escape to Great Britain, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Children’s transports were also being organized to bring thousands of young refugees to England. Helga was scheduled to leave from Prague on one of the upcoming children’s transports.<
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  In the summer of 1939 a seamstress even came to the house to take Helga’s measurements and provide a wardrobe for her trip to Great Britain. Helga got new skirts and blouses, a dress, and a coat, each with her name sewn into it in case something went wrong and she landed in a children’s home instead of joining her mother right away.

  But in the early hours of September 1, 1939, the German battle cruiser Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Westerplatte Peninsula near Gdansk. The German army invaded Poland, and World War II began. New laws were passed that reduced the freedom of movement for Jews, one decree at a time, to an absolute minimum. Then the borders closed, and Helga’s dream of a journey to England was shattered.

  One year later—Helga had just completed the third grade—Jewish children were expelled from public schools. Once again her family found it necessary to send Helga back to Brno, this time because the Jewish school there was now the only type of school she was still allowed to attend. In order to ensure that Helga got the best possible care, her family placed her in the local Jewish orphanage, where she met a good many other children in a similar situation. Helga’s uncle delivered her to the orphanage shortly before the school year started.

  “It was a nightmare. No one was there to receive me, no counselor, no office or service employee, no one at all. I slept in a large, dark room surrounded by about forty empty metal beds. Many children, I learned later, were in the hospital with scarlet fever; others were still on vacation.”

  After a few days the children returned. But Helga’s situation did not improve. “We didn’t have much to eat. To get anything in the morning you had to run to the kitchen, where two serving girls doled out bread. That was all we got, dry bread, and maybe, if you were among the first, a little marmalade. Sometimes my cousin Joši, who by then was also attending school in Brno, waited for me after classes to give me a little wedge of cheese. I couldn’t stand it in that orphanage. I wanted out no matter what.”

  Helga got her way and eventually found shelter with a couple who lived near the Jewish school. The woman took care of her young boarder lovingly, and Helga soon felt comfortable there, especially because Ruth Steiner—a girl her age, the daughter of an ophthalmologist—lived nearby. She became Helga’s first friend.

  Then came the spring of 1941, and with it a decree that made it illegal for Jews in the Protectorate to travel. Without asking anyone, Helga packed her things, went to the train station, and bought a ticket to Kyjov. It was still light when she arrived at her relatives’ home toward evening. Her aunt was feeding the chickens in the yard and was astonished when she suddenly saw Helga standing in front of her, clutching her suitcase. “Here I am again,” she said.

  In the spring of 1941 Otto Pollak was still living in Vienna. His café had been Aryanized and his assets confiscated. He had been forced to give up his beautiful home on Mariahilfer Strasse, along with its valuable furniture, and to move to another place. He had witnessed the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9—10, 1938, when forty-two synagogues and small houses of worship in Vienna were set on fire and plundered, and countless Jewish businesses and homes were confiscated or destroyed. Of the 6,547 Viennese Jews arrested that night, approximately 3,700 ended up in the Dachau concentration camp; some were murdered on the spot.

  The Nazi terror triggered a mass exodus of Jews from Austria. By May 1938, one hundred thousand had fled the country, many of them escaping illegally to neighboring countries. With the outbreak of World War II, Jews still living in Germany and Austria found that almost all their escape routes had been cut off.

  Meanwhile, Poland, with its Jewish population of more than three million, quickly became a laboratory for the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies. Early experiments in uprooting Jews throughout the country evolved into a strategy of forcing them into ghettos established in towns and cities. By late 1941 the Nazis were experimenting with ways to get rid of the weakest and, for them, least productive Jews in these ghettos. They perpetrated the first murders of such people—using gas, in specially adapted trucks—in December 1941 in Chelmno, not far from the large ghetto in the city of Lodz.

  At the same time, an even more threatening new type of Nazi anti-Semitism had begun with the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Mass shootings of Jewish men and boys of military age were now commonplace, and soon expanded to include women and children. Hundreds of thousands died in this way within months. By the fall of 1941, the Nazis had begun deporting Jews from Germany by train to the ghettos and the new killing fields of the East. A war of conquest and annihilation unprecedented in history would leave twenty-seven million Soviet citizens dead and come very close to bringing about the realization of Hitler’s “Final Solution.”

  Otto Pollak barely escaped deportation in the summer of 1941. He had received no transport order, but was simply seized on the street by the SS and forced onto a transport that was about to depart. Still, his luck held. At the last moment, a storm trooper who had frequented Otto’s café pulled him off.

  After this experience, Otto redoubled his efforts to leave Vienna for Kyjov. On September 2, 1941, the Viennese police granted him rare permission to resettle in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. A week later, he arrived in Kyjov. “I was tremendously happy,” Helga recalls. “We were already living in very close quarters, since by then a great many Jewish children were residing in Kyjov. All the Jews from the neighboring areas had to resettle there. But we managed somehow.”

  People were forced to share their homes with other families. Apartments that had housed one family now sheltered several. The house on Market Square was no exception. In one room Helga’s cousin Trude, who had married and was expecting a child, was living with her husband, Hermann. Another room was occupied by a family named Taussig. Joši slept in the kitchen. The third room was shared by Aunt Marta and Uncle Fritz and, separated only by a folding screen, Helga and her father.

  On September 19, 1941, a decree was issued ordering all Jews above the age of six living within the German Reich to wear a six-pointed yellow Star of David with the word Jude (“Jew”) inscribed in black. “It is the Führer’s wish,” Heinrich Himmler wrote to SS Obergruppenführer Arthur Greiser, the Nazi governor of the Wartheland region, in a letter dated September 18, 1941, “that both the Old Reich and the Protectorate, moving from west to east, be emptied and freed of Jews as quickly as possible.”3

  Far from Kyjov, in Prague’s beautiful old Hradschin castle, SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the newly appointed Stellvertretender Reichsprotektor (deputy Reich protector), had set up his offices and convened a secret conference. At the first meeting, the participants, among them Adolf Eichmann and Karl Hermann Frank, discussed actions to be taken regarding the Jewish population in the Protectorate. The minutes from the October 10, 1941, meeting include the following:

  Concerning the possibility of creating ghettos within the Protectorate:

  … In Bohemia one option … is the occupation of Theresienstadt by the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. After evacuation from this temporary assembly camp (whereby the Jews will have already been severely decimated) to the East, the entire area could be expanded to build a model German settlement. …

  The transport to Theresienstadt would not require much time, two to three trains with 1,000 persons each could be sent to Theresienstadt per day. … As well-tested methods have shown, the Jew can carry up to fifty kilos of nonbulky luggage and—in order to ease matters for ourselves—food for fourteen days and up to four weeks. Straw will be strewn in the empty rooms, because the installation of beds would occupy too much space.

  The larger apartments in the good buildings are reserved solely for the Gestapo, the Jewish Council of Elders, the Food Storage Office, and, of course, the guard units. The Jews will have to dig their own quarters in the ground …4

  At a second meeting, on October 17, 1941, the following measures were agreed upon:

  Concerning the Jewish Question:

  … In the meantime, Jew
s from Bohemia and Moravia are to be collected in a provisional camp for later evacuation. … 50,000 to 60,000 Jews can be comfortably accommodated in Theresienstadt. From there the Jews will be sent to the East. Consent has already been obtained from Minsk and Riga for 5,000 Jews each.

  After total evacuation of all Jews, Theresienstadt will be settled by Germans, following a precise plan and thereby becoming a core of German life. It is a very favorable location for this plan. Thus it will become yet another vanguard, perfectly modeled according to the ideas of the Reich Führer SS, as Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of the German People’s National Identity.

  Under no circumstances can even the slightest details of these plans reach the wider public.5

  Also brought up during the discussions was the issue of creating a second temporary holding center, in addition to Theresienstadt, in order to evacuate the Jewish population of Moravia. “The expansion of an existing Jewish village into a ghetto for Moravia is quite possible and would present no great difficulties.” It was Kyjov that they had in mind. But this measure soon proved unnecessary, given the speed at which transports of Jews from Theresienstadt were rolling eastward.

  Deportation to the East, extermination through hard labor, the creation of regions free of Jews—these were the initial cornerstones of a Nazi program that ensnared the Jewish population of Central Europe in its deadly grip. After October 23, 1941, Jews within the Nazi sphere of influence were officially prohibited from emigrating. There was now almost no chance to escape.