The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope, and Survival in Theresienstadt
Page 27
On the Sokolovna terrace, where Helga had lowered her notes down to her father while she was ill with encephalitis, the camera captured people dancing past, dressed in their finest evening clothes; people sitting convivially next to each other under parasols, sipping from champagne glasses with straws. In the garden, prominent people were strolling and engaging in lively conversations; frolicking children played in the children’s playground; and laborers in the workshops—carpenters, cobblers, launderers, tailors—went merrily about their work. On the outskirts of the ghetto a cabaret program was performed before an audience of about two thousand.27
“In a village near Travice, where they had set up a stage, I watched them film a scene that didn’t come out right,” Eva Herrmann recalls, “and saw Rahm, the camp commandant—I think it was Rahm—slap Zelenka, the architect and famed set designer from the Prague National Theater. And that started me thinking: Oh my, something’s not right here. The whole thing is really just one huge sham. They also had young people get up on the stage, and then they pointed to this one or that one. Suddenly it became clear to me that they were looking for particular types, Jewish types, and SS Scharführer Haindl pointed at me—I had black curly hair. And at that moment I knew I didn’t want to have any part in this hoax, made myself scarce, and mingled in with the crowd.”28
Despite both a heat wave—the temperature soared to 104 degrees Fahrenheit on August 21—and a plague of bedbugs, the filming proceeded according to plan. As in the previous year, many of the living quarters, including the Girls’ Home, had to be freed from bedbugs and lice. “Helga is sleeping in Frau Mandl’s room at the Home for Invalids, above Frau Heilbrun’s bed,” Otto Pollak noted on August 24. “At nine in the evening Helga takes a cold bath in the bathtub. Altenstein looks for bedbugs with a cigarette lighter. I watch his silhouette from the courtyard. Helga has slept well during the first night here with us. Her sleep wasn’t disrupted by bedbugs. She has words of praise for our washing facility, which reminds her of peacetime.”
On August 28, Otto Pollak likewise had to flee the bedbugs. The night before, he had turned on the light every half hour so that he and Schmitz, from the adjoining bed, could hunt down and kill hundreds of bedbugs. Now he was sleeping in the open air for the first time. “A dark blue sky sown with stars, cool air. After weeks of not being able to sleep, I slept like the Lord God himself, until five-thirty. I served Helga her breakfast—coffee and bread with margarine—in bed. She was absolutely delighted and said that this was the first time she’d ever been served breakfast in bed in Theresienstadt.”
Meanwhile, the shooting went on. They filmed the town orchestra playing in Market Square; a soccer game before about four hundred spectators in the courtyard of the Dresden Barracks at three o’clock on the afternoon of August 31; the first act of The Tales of Hoffmann in the auditorium of the Sokolovna; and the premiere of Pavel Haas’s Study for String Orchestra, played by the symphony orchestra under the direction of Karel Ančerl. And against the backdrop of a town created by František Zelenka, they filmed the children’s opera Brundibár.
“I recall those days only vaguely,” Flaška says. “We were very agitated. It was hard work to put it on for the Germans, even though we knew the opera very well. But there was Kurt Gerron, who was very energetic, and there were all the camera people, and sitting up in the balcony was the SS. I remember the SS sitting up there, watching us. It was different from usual—a tense atmosphere.”
“We weren’t used to the large stage of the Sokolovna,” Handa explains. “There was a lot more room than in the Magdeburg Barracks. I didn’t feel at all comfortable on this stage. It was all too new, too big. From time to time we had to move to the music and arrive at a particular spot on the stage. And I was afraid sometimes that I wouldn’t end up where I was supposed to end up, and would be standing in the wrong spot.”
And yet the children performed their opera with growing enthusiasm. As always, many of their fans were in the audience. They all wanted to see Brundibár and were eager to see how it was going to turn out this time, under spotlights and cameras. In spite of everything, it was an extraordinary event, both for those in the cast and for the audience. Let the Germans do what they wanted with their hoax and their film, let them present the world with their fairy-tale lie about Theresienstadt as a cultural paradise and model ghetto—they could not lay a finger on Brundibár.
Up in the balcony, on the side reserved for the Germans, unexpected guests were seated: the wives and children of the SS men.
Now they could show them. The children could show them what people degraded as subhumans and often cursed as “Jewish swine” were capable of. We, their message seemed to be, we poor, starving, caged children can put on a show like this. With music that pleases even you, and your children!
This notice required Flaška to participate in the production of Brundibár, which the director Kurt Gerron was filming for the Nazi propaganda documentary.
“The music is simply enchanting,” Thomas Mandl, the young violinist for the coffeehouse orchestra, wrote, describing his impressions after a few performances. “The music is of such high quality, so wonderfully varied and demanding and thrilling and evocative, that anyone with a spark of musicality is carried away from start to finish. There are so many subtle and clever melodic devices and the instrumentation is so intelligent and at the same time so deftly written that these children could really sing their roles. They certainly weren’t professionals. They were just ‘ordinary’ children. But with that ordinary set in quotes.”
On August 20, the children put on their beloved opera for one of the last of a total of fifty-five performances. And little Paul made his trumpet ring for all it was worth. “When the SS was present, I always had this shadowy feeling at the back of my head. I knew I could not play wrong, and you can hear every wrong note very clearly on a trumpet. Rahm would notice, I thought to myself, and be mad at me, and put me on a transport. And in those moments it was as if I were playing for my life.”
Miriam Rosenzweig
Miriam Rosenzweig was born in Košice, a town in eastern Slovakia, near the Hungarian border, on November 7, 1929. When she was six, her family’s serious financial problems drove them to move to Ostrava in the hope of making a fresh start. But the Nazis soon put an abrupt end to their efforts. On October 18, 1939, Miriam’s father and 901 other Jews from Ostrava were forced to board a transport for, as it was called in the official jargon, “voluntary resettlement to a reeducation camp.” It was the first transport to leave the German Reich and its annexed territories. Its destination was the little Polish town of Nisko on the San River, in the district of Lublin. Miriam never saw her father again. Three years later, in early October 1942, Miriam, her mother, and her sister arrived in Theresienstadt. “I was ill all that winter. I had dysentery and an ear infection. There were no medicines. The doctor could only puncture my eardrum every day to drain the pus. It got worse and worse, and I had a high fever.”
Finally, vital medicines found their way into the ghetto, and Miriam recovered. It was spring, however, before she could join her mother in the attic of the Magdeburg Barracks, where she lived until the end of 1943, when she moved into Room 28.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ghetto Tears
The evening of September 2, 1944, did not bode well. Around eleven o’clock that night, a severe thunderstorm broke out above Theresienstadt, drenching the town in heavy rains. The bad weather caused a power outage and left the ghetto in terrifying darkness, relieved only by repeated flashes of lightning. “After that, swarms of starving bedbugs flooded the entire camp,” Otto Pollak wrote.
By this time people were caught up in a mixture of euphoria and fear. The tension that had prevailed during the visit of the International Red Cross delegation and the unrelenting frenzy surrounding the propaganda film still seemed to hang in the air and charge it with explosive force. Artistic pursuits also took on a feverish, almost superhuman intensity.
In the
Sokolovna auditorium, in the town hall, in the Magdeburg Barracks and the old movie hall, in the gymnasium of L 417, in the coffee-house, and in many attics—there were performances everywhere, some of them of the highest artistic quality. Edith Steiner-Kraus provided the accompaniment on a spinet for a performance of Carmen directed by Franz Eugen Klein; Karl Fischer conducted Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah. In the attic of the Magdeburg Barracks, Norbert Frýd presented a dramatic version of the biblical story of Esther with music by Karel Reiner, and Hanus Jochowitz directed Mozart’s Bastien and Bastienne on a different stage. There were evening song recitals with Karel Berman and Rafael Schächter, chamber music concerts, and solo concerts by several piano virtuosi—Bernhard Kaff, Gideon Klein, Edith Steiner-Kraus, Renée Gärtner-Geiringer, and Juliette Arányi.
This poem, “The Vintage Wine of 1944,” written by an unnamed fellow prisoner of Theresienstadt, was saved by Otto Pollak.
THE VINTAGE WINE OF 1944
When there will come the time you seek a name
For a drop of vintage wine,
A name to capture what’s within, not watered down, but dry
(I mean someday, at home—in Palestine)
Then call it: “Ghetto Tears 1944.”
Like “Henkel Dry” or “Tears of Magdalene,”
This brand will gain renown
Nor let its drinkers down
There is no water in these tears,
Just purest wine,
The name itself is guarantee.
“Vintage 1944.”
And you must search the years long past
And far ahead your eyes must cast
To find that kind of tears
So dry, and none with peers,
As “Vintage 1944.”
Theresienstadt, October 1, 1944
One of the final opera premieres, La Serva Padrona, an opera buffa by Giovanni Batista Pergolesi, was performed in the Sokolovna auditorium. The conductor was Karel Berman, Rafael Schächter played the piano accompaniment, and, as Viktor Ullmann noted, “it was a pleasure to hear Hans Krása at the harpsichord.”1 Karel Švenk played the role of the servant Vespone, and Marion Podolier and Bedřich Borges gave brilliant performances as well. “It was the last premiere I was able to mount in cooperation with František Zelenka,” Karel Berman wrote in his memoirs. “Our ensemble was dissolved after three performances.”
As on several previous occasions, Alice Herz-Sommer gave a solo concert of Chopin’s études in the town hall. “To play all twenty-four études in one evening is to take both a physical and an artistic risk,” Viktor Ullmann wrote. “These are, after all, ‘études,’ exercises for the development of Romantic piano technique. Alice Herz-Sommer is a justly admired pianist, short perhaps in stature but great in artistry, and her rendition of certain études was phenomenal, but the program as a whole is to be rejected.”2
What Ullmann did not know and would never be able to learn was that this concert left a strong impression on many of those who heard it and would later survive the war. “We were gently lifted out of our narrow, starving Terezin and taken to another time and world,” Zdenka Fantlová said of this concert in her autobiography. “Sitting on a wooden bench I listened as if in a trance. Forever unforgettable!”3
Alice’s playing remained unforgettable for Flaška as well. Indeed, for her it became a crucial inspiration. “The Chopin études by Alice Herz-Sommer left such a deep impression on me that I decided that very evening to become a pianist. And I did.”
Meanwhile, in the cellar of L 411, rehearsals had begun for the chamber opera The Emperor of Atlantis, or the Refusal to Die, which Victor Ullmann had composed the previous year, basing it on a libretto by the young painter and poet Peter Kien. This allegorical ballad/opera about life and death and a tyrant named Overall reflects the inner spiritual revolt of its creators and of those who participated in the production.
Shortly before the dress rehearsal in late summer 1944, the project was canceled. Paul Kling, the violin prodigy from Opava, who had just turned fifteen and was already part of the string quintet, had only vague memories of the moment. “No one knows just why the cancellation came about, whether the camp administration decided the premise was too risky, or the camp commandant himself prohibited it, or the Council of Elders ordered the production terminated—no one today can say. Someone at the time knew of course. But these people are no longer alive. I am almost the only one who survived, and I of course know the least, since I was the youngest.”4
And so no one heard Death’s aria from The Emperor of Atlantis: “I am the gardener Death, I sow sleep in furrows plowed with pain. I am Death, the gardener Death, and pull up wilting weeds of weary creatures.”
Only Verdi’s Requiem was heard one last time, sung by Rafael Schächter’s legendary choir—“Requiem aeternam, dona eis, Domine. Libera me.”
The earth is red with blood
The year advances wearily
It is war
My God, it is war
The battlefields
Overflow with blood
The earth is so tired
The moment of hopelessness
Stands on the horizon
Even the sun
Shines through the blood
And says:
Brothers, stop
Murdering one another!
Have you not had enough of war
Do you not know
That you are human beings?
There is no point
In finding human beings
If the world no longer exists
The moon moves calmly across the sky
And it too gazes in sadness down at the earth
And says: God, do you not see
How the world suffers
Everything is bathed in blood!
It is impossible to recover from this
When the heart of humankind
Is bullet-riddled.
Handa Pollak, from her notebook, Všechno, 1944
It was a period that alternated between hope and despair. When word spread through the ghetto that the Allied armies had successfully landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944, hope was on the rise. The end of the war no longer seemed far off. The overwhelming force of Allied troops was bearing down on the German Reich from all directions. In the West, the final phase of the liberation of France from four years of German occupation had begun. The Red Army was approaching from the East. In January it had reached the eastern border of Poland, and had been advancing in a steady series of offensives ever since. By the middle of August, the border of East Prussia had been reached, and the Red Army was headed in the direction of Warsaw and to the great bend in the Vistula. “Telegram from Stalin,” reads Otto Pollak’s diary. “ ‘Send ten million mattresses. Our soldiers are right at the border.’ ”
But whenever hope budded spontaneously, it was always overshadowed by other ominous events and news. As before, the general mood was dominated by worries that were grimly confirmed when, on July 17, three boys fled from the ghetto, including, as Otto Pollak reports, “young Sklarek from Berlin. Presumably in reprisal, five renowned artists were arrested along with their families for defaming the ghetto and are confined in the Little Fortress.”
The Theresienstadt painters’ affair left the ghetto in great agitation and even greater fear.5 Everyone knew these painters, especially Bedřich Fritta (Fritz Taussig), Otto Ungar, Felix Bloch, and Leo Haas, whose works are among the most valuable extant documents from the period of the Theresienstadt ghetto. Many people also knew Bedřich Fritta’s three-year-old son, “droll, chubby-cheeked Tommy,” whom Otto Pollak had often enjoyed entertaining. The child likewise vanished on July 17, leaving behind only gloomy forebodings.
And yet—the pendulum continued to swing to the side of hope. Everything was in flux; there was no doubt that the Allied armies were advancing. The residents of Theresienstadt could see that with their own eyes. “The first swarm of silver birds, flying in the bright sunlight across the s
outhwest,” Otto Pollak wrote on July 21, 1944, “were observed between eleven in the morning and one in the afternoon. The children in the Home watched the spectacle from their window on the third floor. We are caught up in indescribable excitement. (Children blew kisses at them.)”
The next day a new rumor sent a wave of excitement through the ghetto. “AH succumbed to his wounds at two this afternoon,” Otto Pollak noted. The news of Stauffenberg’s attempted assassination of Hitler in the Führer’s headquarters in East Prussia on July 20 had found its way to Theresienstadt. The news that it had not succeeded was slower in getting through. As late as July 30, a mistaken version of the outcome of the attempt still prevailed, lifting everyone’s hopes. “In light of the good news,” Otto Pollak wrote on July 30, “a tide of good health is sweeping the ghetto.”
Man at the Well, pencil drawing by Jo Spier
By now the Allies were launching air raids day and night against German munitions depots, oil refineries, radar stations, V-1 launching pads, communication centers, transport facilities, and cities. “Twelve noon,” Otto Pollak wrote on August 24. “For the second time those shiny silver birds … in the east, moving southwestward.”
The effect of such events was enormous. And now that the air-raid alarm was sounded once or twice a day, there were happy faces and optimistic conversations everywhere. Was it not obvious that the Germans would soon be defeated and would finally lay down their arms?