Friedl Dicker-Brandeis was forty-four years old when she, her husband, Pavel Brandeis, and her friend Laura Šimko arrived in Theresienstadt on December 17, 1942, on transport “Ch” from Hradec Králové. In acknowledgment of her career as an artist, she was first assigned to the “Technical Department,” a sort of engineering office whose official task was the production of whatever technical drawings the ghetto needed. But this SS-sanctioned activity produced creative work that documented the reality of life in the ghetto—studies, sketches, paintings, posters— hundreds of works in all. The department was headed by the painter Bedřich Fritta (aka Fritz Taussig). At his side were experienced colleagues: Otto Ungar, Leo Haas, Felix Bloch, Jo Spier, the young Peter Kien, and others.
The strict documentary realism characteristic of these artists was not really in Friedl’s nature. Her understanding of art was nourished by other sources. Her interests moved her in a different direction, and soon, following her inner desires, she was to be found only among the children.
In her classes Friedl passed on her rich trove of experience in both artistic and human realms, rousing in the children latent energies that could function as a positive counterweight to their oppressive existence and that could restore their psychological balance. She awakened memories of what was good in the children’s past and strengthened their hope for a better future. And she helped them recapture some of their self-confidence and build up their courage. In this way she lived up to her credo: “Wherever energy reflects upon itself and, without fear of appearing ridiculous, attempts to prevail on its own, a new source of creativity opens up—and that is the goal of our attempts to teach drawing.”
Proof that she succeeded, if only for a few hours, is found in the more than three thousand drawings created by children under her leadership— each one a child’s witness to life in the ghetto. They offer a message different from that of the drawings and paintings by Theresienstadt’s adult artists, who were committed to documentary realism. This was the case not only because children painted and drew these pictures, but also because the work of these children reveals the influence of a particular school of art and of a very modern theory of artistic pedagogy. These children’s drawings—some of which can be considered works of art— are the result of an ambitious professional method of instruction and the influence of an extraordinarily gifted teacher.
Born Friederike Dicker in Vienna on July 30, 1898, she began her education in art as a sixteen-year-old pupil of Franz Cizek at the Vienna School of Applied Arts. Cizek, whose drawing and painting classes were founded on the principle of the free development of spontaneous artistic expression, helped give birth to what would ultimately become modern art therapy. Cizek and Johannes Itten, whose private art school Friedl attended a year later, gave her the crucial foundation for her own work. It was above all Itten’s artistic instruction—which was based on chiaroscuro, color composition, and rhythmic drawing exercises, and on the principle of recognizing and appreciating individual expression—that provided the fundamental methodology for her work as an artist.
Friedl Dicker-Brandéis (1898–1944)
When Johannes Itten was invited by Walter Gropius to be part of the Bauhaus in 1919, Friedl followed her teacher to Weimar. The innovative concepts of this most influential art school of the twentieth century matched the ideas and expectations of the young art student eager to put theory into practice. “There is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman. The artist is the exalted craftsman,” Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, proclaimed in a prospectus that called for an end to traditional idealized concepts of art and for the ennoblement of the work of the craftsman.
For the next four years Friedl studied all that the Bauhaus had to offer: textile design with Georg Muche, lithography with Lyonel Feininger, and theater design with Oskar Schlemmer and Lothar Schreyer. She learned bookbinding, graphic design, weaving, and embroidery. After Paul Klee arrived at the Bauhaus in 1921, she never missed one of his lectures—or any opportunity to watch over her revered master’s shoulder as he worked. Along with Franz Cizek and Johannes Itten, it was above all Paul Klee who became the inspiration for her remarkable pedagogical achievements, which ultimately reached their full maturity in her art classes in Theresienstadt.
“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 way 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.
The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope, and Survival in Theresienstadt Page 18