The men left very quickly and right away someone came bounding up the stairs and said, “Well, that was some disaster! Something will happen now. Don’t you realize what you said?” We were all flabbergasted. We didn’t really know what that was—Communism.
But thank God—nothing came of it.24
On the contrary, Rossel was quite impressed, especially by the Children’s Homes: “They are furnished quite nicely and reasonably, with very decorative murals that are also of remarkable educational value.” And perhaps it was in fact the comment made by the brave girl from Ostrava—presumably the only person among all the prisoners to speak a single word to the delegation—that prompted him to conclude his report with this bold assertion: “This Jewish town is truly astounding. In view of the fact that these people come from many different places, speak different languages, arrive from different stations in life and with different degrees of wealth, it was necessary to establish a unity, a spirit of community, among these Jews. That was very difficult. The Theresienstadt ghetto is a Communist society, led by a ‘Stalinist’ of great merit: EPPSTEIN.”
What else could one expect of a Maurice Rossel? Of a young man who took his job so literally that, unless it was demanded of him, he never looked to his right or his left and certainly never peeked behind the scenery? “During this visit I was supposed to view what they showed me,” he declared in a conversation with Claude Lanzmann. And that is exactly what he did. No more and no less. And to make sure that Rossel would also be able to tell the world about the astonishing cultural life in Theresienstadt, he was driven through town alongside the “mayor” in a limousine chauffeured by Hans Wostrell from Linz, a brutal SS officer who, in order to look more like Paul Eppstein’s driver, dressed in civilian clothes.
As the bells in the church steeple began to toll at the stroke of five o’clock, the town orchestra, under the direction of Carlo S. Taube, began to play a medley of cheerful tunes. One of them was a song, so Otto Pollak tells us, from the operetta The Czar’s Diamond by Granichstaedten: “For you, my dear, I’ve made myself beautiful.” But who among the visitors could have or would have wanted to take that obvious musical hint?
Everything was in place at the Sokolovna when the visitors finally arrived. Upstairs there was a rehearsal for Verdi’s Requiem. In the main auditorium the children were performing Brundibár, from which, according to the plan, the visitors were to see the finale. “We stood on the stage and they told us that when given our cue we should start with the finale,” Eva Herrmann, who was in the chorus of schoolchildren, recalls. “We waited a long time, and then someone came running in and said, ‘Now.’ And we started. And then someone else came running in and said, ‘No, not yet.’ And so it went, back and forth. We knew, of course, that we were putting on a comedy act for somebody. But of course, since this was a commission of the International Red Cross, we also thought and hoped that this would help us in some way. They might say, ‘These children sing so beautifully we just have to help them.’ We always hoped. Or at least most of us hoped—that maybe something would come of it after all.”
“I was given the first signal as the car turned the corner,” Rudolf Freudenfeld noted in his report. “The second signal meant that they were coming up the stairs, and at the third signal I dropped my raised hand and gave the downbeat. The music that greeted the visitors was: ‘We have defeated Brundibár because we weren’t afraid. We didn’t let ourselves be defeated.’ The children had been told that at one specific point they were to hold up high whatever they had in their hand—books, schoolbags, notebooks. But, like children everywhere, most of them had forgotten their prop. And so they simply raised their balled fists. As I was told later, the visitors liked it.”
“We would like to say,” Rossel added at the end of his report, “that we were greatly astonished to find the ghetto to be a town that lives an almost normal life; we had expected worse. We told the officers of the SS who escorted us that the difficulty we had encountered in obtaining permission to visit Theresienstadt was the most surprising thing of all.”
“There was that whole farce with the Red Cross,” Judith Schwarzbart comments, decades later, when recalling that remarkable day, “and my father was ordered to beautify the park, to set out flowers. Once the Red Cross hubbub was over, I was astonished to see that nothing whatsoever came of it. Why didn’t these men see anything? Why didn’t they look behind the facade? If they had just taken a peek, they would have seen all the old half-starved people who weren’t allowed out on the street. If they had just opened a door to one of the barracks, they would have seen what was going on there. But they didn’t do any of it. They walked down the street, through the lovely park. The coffeehouse had been made to look nice and pretty, with a few tables set outside, where young attractive women in elegant clothes were ordered to sit and drink a cup of coffee; and in the park was a pavilion, where they played music, and the Red Cross people never went over to have a peek at what was behind this farce. And that astounded me. It shocked me. Yes, it robbed me of a bit of my faith.”
One week after his visit to the ghetto, Rossel sent his companion, Dr. Eberhard von Thadden, legation councilor in the Reich Foreign Ministry, copies of two photographs taken during the Theresienstadt visit, accompanied by these words: “We would like to take this opportunity to express to you, in the name of the International Committee of the Red Cross, our sincere gratitude for organizing our visit to Theresienstadt. Thanks to your efforts our visit was facilitated in all respects. We shall always have fine memories of our trip to Prague, and we are happy to assure you yet again that our report of our visit to Theresienstadt will come as a relief to a great many people, inasmuch as we found conditions there satisfactory.”
The real satisfaction, however, was felt by those who had initiated and directed this successful production, primarily because of this key assertion in Rossel’s report, which could now be disseminated around the world. At a time when thirty-two thousand people had already died in Theresienstadt and approximately sixty-eight thousand people had been transported to the East, Maurice Rossel wrote: “The camp at Theresienstadt is a ‘final destination camp,’ and normally no one who has come to this ghetto is sent on to somewhere else.”
A visit to a “Jewish labor camp,” which had already been authorized by Himmler, had now become superfluous. The inspectors had no further questions, so no other Potemkin villages needed to be put on display. The family camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau could be eliminated.
On July 2, 1944, all the women that Mengele had selected as being capable of work were sent on foot to the women’s camp, which was not too far from the family camp. Eva Landa recalls:
For several days we could still look through the barbed wire and see the people who were left behind in the family camp. Then it became very quiet and empty there. There was heavy smoke coming from the crematoria chimneys. New selections were being made on a constant basis. The weak and sickly and those who had succeeded in bringing their children to the women’s camp had to go back to the family camp. Then came the last selection in Auschwitz that I was part of. One row ahead of me were Helena Mendl and her mother, who told the SS man that Helena was not completely healthy, that she had had meningitis as a child. And I think Holubička’s mother said something similar. They hoped that this would keep their daughters from being assigned heavy work. They were separated out and had to stand off by themselves. And then there was also our block elder, Marika, a beautiful young woman. She had a three-year-old child. And the SS man told her, “Leave the child here. Do you know where they will take you if you stay with her?” And Marika said, “Yes, and I’m staying with my child.” So they stood off from us at a little distance, in an extra group—Helena, Holubička, and Marika with her little daughter. It was the last time I saw them.
My mother and I were almost the last to be chosen for work and put on a new transport. We were on the train again, though we didn’t know where we were headed. But we did know that we were leaving A
uschwitz, leaving the horror of the gas chambers. We knew what those words meant. And we thought that it was a good thing to get away from Auschwitz—far away—because it was very easy to perish there, and very hard to escape death.
We rode on the train for a long time. Then we had to change to a small train with open cars. We all had to stand; there wasn’t enough room to sit. The region we were riding through was very beautiful— forest all around us. It was summer, the sun was shining—and we were far away from Auschwitz-Birkenau.
“After this final selection in early July 1944, nothing happened for ten days,” Eva Weiss recalls.
Life in Block 31 went on. Then there was another lockdown— disruption and goodbyes. I saw many of the children for the last time. I remember how terribly sorry I felt for Zajíček. It was impossible for her to make it through the selection—she was so small. She had always clung to me. She was such a poor, lovable thing, such a forlorn child. She radiated warmth. There was a special aura about her, as if she were trying to say, Come, help me! She knew what awaited her. All the children knew. We knew that we would never see each other again.
Our group was taken to the Auschwitz women’s camp. We huddled very close together. The chimney was still a real possibility for us. We thought it was some evil joke by Mengele to let us think that we would escape the gas. We spent several days under dreadful conditions in the women’s camp before we were led to the “sauna” again. We thought—this is it. But instead of gas, water came out of the showerheads. What an immense relief! Then they threw a pile of dirty clothes and shoes at us, and we had to quickly grab something that looked more or less like it might fit, with them bellowing at us the whole time. After we were dressed we looked around—and broke into loud, uncontrollable laughter. We simply couldn’t believe that we had escaped the worst. We still had our hair, which was a major exception in the camp. There we stood, howling with laughter and waiting for what would happen next.
On July 2, 1944, they gave us different clothes, a kind of khaki uniform, and we were put on cattle cars. We couldn’t believe our good luck. We were all young women. We were in a hopeful mood, and through the chinks in the car we could make out a green landscape. We appeared to be getting closer to Germany and we thought nothing from here on could be as bad as the time we had spent in the shadow of the chimneys. After a day traveling on the train, guarded the whole time by female SS personnel, a few of the cars were uncoupled. Then the train moved on.
In early July 1944, Hanka Wertheimer and her mother survived a selection. It was their last one before they would leave Auschwitz, and before the family camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau B II b was eliminated during the night of July 10, 1944. Hanka remembers:
We had to walk past the SS men and give our age and profession. Eva Landa and another girl from our home, Gerty Kersten, were in front of me. I can still hear an SS man saying as he pointed at Eva and Gerty: “Look at those pretty Jewesses.” They were sent to the right. I was directly behind them and I said, “Agriculture, sixteen years old.” I was lying because my mother had told me to. She had also managed—I don’t know how—to get hold of a dab of lipstick and had rubbed it on my cheeks so that I’d look healthier, because I was very pale. Like Eva and Gerty I was sent to the right. As were my friends Miriam Rosenzweig and her sister Vera. We didn’t yet know what it meant to stand on the left or the right. Next to the SS men were two kapos—Jews who had to help see that the orders of the SS were carried out. One of them was a Dr. Wehle, a lawyer my mother knew. When he noticed her and saw that although she gave her age as forty—in reality she was forty-three—she was sent to the left, he gave her concealed signals to slip into the line on the right, which she immediately did. I didn’t notice any of this because I was already past the SS men and was standing with my back to them. That’s how it came about that my mother stayed with me and we finally made it out of Auschwitz together.
After this selection we arrived in the women’s camp. It was on the other side of the railroad tracks. We met a lot of women from Poland who you could tell had been there for a long time. … But we were soon loaded onto freight cars and sent elsewhere.
Theresienstadt, August 19, 1944: “A cultural documentary is being filmed this afternoon,” Otto Pollak noted in his diary, “in a hollow on the road to Litoměřice—an open-air cabaret that accommodates an audience of about 2,000. About sixty swimmers of both sexes are to be filmed at the SS swimming pool outside the ghetto. Dita Sachs from the Nurses’ Home, slender, about five foot nine, blond, blue-eyed, was excluded, along with two other blond girls. I’ve also heard they’ve excluded a Danish actor, a blond giant of aman. Gerron, who enjoys making inappropriate jokes about Jews, is directing.”
“Crazy things have been happening during the last few days—they’re making a film!” Eva Herrmann noted with astonishment in her diary the next day.25 “The town orchestra, the children’s pavilion, our performances, and life on the streets and even outside of Theresienstadt. Five girls from each room are to report for the filming. I managed to be one of them, and so we were able to get out of the ghetto, to Travice, where a stage was set up.”
The scenery was in place, the dress rehearsal had worked perfectly, a director was found, a script authorized, and a film crew hired. The filming could begin. It was an enterprise that had long been planned by the top echelon of the SS in Prague. Theresienstadt: A Documentary of a Jewish Settlement was a piece of Nazi propaganda that has since come to be known as The Führer Gives the Jews a Town.
Kurt Gerron—an actor, cabaret performer, and former star of Germany’s preeminent film studio UFA—was both the producer and the director. His 1928 recording of “Mack the Knife” from The Threepenny Opera had made him a sensation, and when he appeared as the vaudeville director Kiepert in The Blue Angel alongside Marlene Dietrich, his international career was launched—and then derailed by Hitler. In January 1944 he was deported from the Westerbork Camp in the Netherlands and sent to Theresienstadt, where he soon established a cabaret called the Carousel. One of Gerron’s leading lyricists, Martin Greiffenhagen, was assigned to be his scriptwriter for the film, and from Prague came the team from Aktualita, the weekly Czech newsreel. The main actors and walk-ons were already on location—the inmates of the Theresienstadt ghetto.
“In those days I was working in the fields,” Vera Nath recalls. “And we saw people going for a swim in the Eger. It looked like a summer camp, like a shore resort.”
“My sister Zdenka and I and some other girls,” Marta Fröhlich recalls, “were brought to a swimming area along the banks of the Eger. We had to put on bathing suits, then sing a song, jump gleefully into the water, and then keep on ducking underwater and pretending that we were so very happy. There were swings that we had to swing on. Then they gave us some bread spread with margarine—not to eat, but to hold so that they could film us. And my brothers had to climb up on a horse-drawn wagon. And the wagon was full of fruits and vegetables—apples, pears, potatoes, carrots. But during the entire ride they weren’t allowed to bite into a single apple.”
“I remember one thing,” Handa Pollak says. “The bigger girls from our Home were working in the vegetable gardens. Of course, eating any of the vegetables was strictly forbidden. While they were making the film the girls were painted brown so they would look tanned and healthy. Every girl got a basket of vegetables to dangle from her arm, and then they had to walk along the road toward the camera in a group, singing. At one particular point they had to pick up an apple or some other fruit and bite into it, then turn a corner, where the basket and even the fruit they had bitten into were immediately taken away. I still recall them telling us about it. It made them laugh so hard, and we laughed along with them. We just made fun of the whole charade.”
“When someone gave a whistle, we had to march off with rakes in our hands and walk past the church,” Helga Pollak recalls. “And there on the steps stood Kurt Gerron. Then there was another whistle, and we had to take a few steps back, stand stock-s
till, and then came the command again: Keep marching and be cheerful.”
“We were afraid of Kurt Gerron,” Ela Stein comments in describing the general atmosphere. “The Germans were constantly circling around him. We didn’t know whether he was in cahoots with them or not. There was a lot of tension in the air. The Czech film people weren’t even allowed to speak with us.”
The team filmed every inch of the Potemkin village: the Bank of the Jewish Self-Administration; the post office, where the walk-ons had to stand in line waiting for packages to be distributed; a meeting of the Council of Elders, which was moved from the gloomy Magdeburg Barracks to an elegantly furnished room in the Sokolovna; firemen extinguishing a fake fire; doctors performing surgery. And, of course, the central library, managed by Professor Utitz, had been “spruced up beyond recognition,” displaying the splendid spines of the Encyclopaedia Judaica and the Jewish Lexicon.26
The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope, and Survival in Theresienstadt Page 26