The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope, and Survival in Theresienstadt
Page 28
People are blind and helpless
And the good ones lie buried in the earth
When will peace finally
Fill the hearts of men?
Open your eyes, you blind people
Look upon it and do something
To make the awful booming cloud of war
Be swept away.
And one day, perhaps
All nations will shake hands
They will triumph over evil
And be friends again.
And they will defend the truth
And call out in their happiness:
“Evil is banned;
We no longer need to fight.”
Handa Pollak, from her notebook, Všechno, 1944
For prisoners wavering between hope and fear, the New Year’s message of the Jewish elder Paul Eppstein, issued on September 16, 1944, in the name of the Theresienstadt Council of Elders, must have seemed like an ominous tipping of the scales. Eppstein wished them all the best for the year 5705 of the Jewish calendar, and thanked them for the work achieved in the year just past and for their discipline in carrying out their duties. Then, as reported the next day in the Communications of the Jewish Self-Administration, he added: “In a time of great decisions that are changing the course of world history, when it has been our fate to live as if on an island, our own resiliency is crucial for us in shaping our lives and in recognizing our historic task of meeting our responsibilities for our community.”6
“These times do not allow me to speak openly.” These words as well, according to an eyewitness account, were included in an address in which the chief elder fervently appealed to the ghetto residents for their trust. “I would nevertheless like to employ a comparison that may help you understand our current situation.” And he likened Theresienstadt to a ship nearing its harbor. “The harbor is, however, encircled with mines, and only the captain knows the course, which, though not direct, is the only one that will bring us safely into port.”7
On Saturday, September 23, more swarms of silver birds passed over Theresienstadt. “Gazing at those airplanes coming from who knows how far away, Helga has been caught up in strong longings for her mother, which she told me about this evening, trying to hold back her tears,” Otto Pollak wrote, and then continued, “There is a rumor that during the Jewish holy days, 5,000 Jewish men between the ages of eighteen and fifty will be sent on two transports to D. How can the ghetto manage if nearly all the men capable of work have to leave? What lies behind such a measure?”
The next day, the SS issued a written decree—in the Communications of the Jewish Self-Administration—that every resident of the ghetto needed to know:
With a view to total employment of all forces, it has been decided … that opportunities for work needed to meet current demands in Theresienstadt will be expanded. Men capable of work will therefore be employed in priority tasks outside Theresienstadt, much as the “outside work brigades for constructing barracks” were employed. To this end, on Tuesday, September 26, and Wednesday, September 27, following instructions of the appropriate office, 2,500 men between ages sixteen and fifty-five will be processed each day and sent from the settlement to other districts of the Reich. … All such men must therefore immediately prepare for transport and assume they will be summoned.8
The transport lists were now announced and the orders issued. Riesa, near Dresden, was the place of employment, at least according to the rumor that the SS had made a point of circulating. No one trusted such information anymore. People were aware of just one thing: A catastrophe had overtaken them.
“The ghetto is caught up in great unrest, since in a few days so many men will be leaving their wives behind, fathers their children, sons their mothers,” Otto Pollak wrote on September 24. And a day later: “Helga is helping her chemistry professor, Miloš Salus, pack his things, since he has to leave on the transport, as does a teacher who, she says, always wears an ironic smile and whom she describes as an ‘elegantarium.’ Felix is saying his goodbyes, since he will be confined to holding barracks tomorrow. He is calm and composed.”9
In all the uproar, only a few people noticed that sometime between three and four o’clock on the afternoon of September 27, Paul Eppstein vanished into a closed truck. He was taken to the Little Fortress and murdered that same day. No one in the ghetto learned of this, not even his wife, Hedwig, who came to the SS headquarters every day with a pot of food for him. “Gentlemen,” Heinrich Jöckel, the feared commander of the Little Fortress, who spared no effort to torture and murder his victims in the cruelest ways possible, said to his accomplices, “I expect you to maintain the strictest silence about this matter; it is an issue of far-reaching significance.”10
One day later, at noon on September 28, 1944, Transport Ek was the first to leave, with 2,499 men on it. Engineer Otto Zucker, the designated “leader of the labor camp,” was on this transport, along with other members of the so-called staff of Theresienstadt. Almost without exception, those who left were men in their prime, among them the singer Karel Berman, the young violinists Paul Kling and Thomas Mandl, Rudolf Freudenfeld, who had directed Brundibár, and Karel Pollak, Handa’s father, whom the girls called Strejda. Their last moments together are burned forever into Handa’s memory:
“The day before my father had to board the transport was Yom Kippur. We sat on the ramparts above the Cavalier Barracks—Tella, my father, and I. We talked about our life after the war. And we promised one another that when we were all reunited we would always observe Yom Kippur as a day of fasting. But my father never returned.”
At eight o’clock that evening, Otto Pollak went to the sluice. Alongside the tracks, “four arc lamps on the side of the building illuminate the street bright as day. A locomotive with the second train of cars is pulling in. The first cars are large cattle cars refitted with big windows.”
“And then came the moment when five thousand men between twenty and fifty-five, in the best years of their adult lives, were sent away all at once,” Alice Herz-Sommer recalls. “Among them were my husband and the husband of my best friend, Edith Steiner-Kraus. That goodbye—it was a terrible shock for my son! I had to give my husband my word of honor that I would not volunteer for a transport. The transport pulled out, and then, only two days later, another transport was ordered and we were told: ‘Wives can now follow their husbands.’ ”
The SS circulated a flyer stating that only a limited number of family members would be allowed to join this labor transport that was so important for the war effort. So it was a labor camp after all? “Many of the women volunteered,” says Alice, “but my friend Edith and I did not.”
Five hundred women fell into the SS’s trap. They voluntarily joined two subsequent transports, El and Em, that left Theresienstadt on September 29 and October 1. Rahm and Haindl amused themselves—and not for the first time—by striking and cursing the prisoners in order to move them onto the cars more quickly.
Eichmann’s adjutant Ernst Möhs was already handing out typewritten lists of names with special instructions to the newly appointed chief elder, Dr. Benjamin Murmelstein. One of them stated that high-ranking officials in the ghetto administration, officials in the Jewish organizations, former officers in all armies, important inventors, and prominent individuals would also be transported.
Summonses were issued day and night without a pause for one whole month—almost nineteen thousand orders for transport. Hardly anyone was able to sleep now. The residents of the ghetto were petrified.
“They just wept, wept, wept. No one said a word. So many people were gone,” Marta Fröhlich says. “My older brother, Jenda, our protector, was gone. I almost left with him. Our counselor Eva Eckstein left voluntarily to be with her sister and her fiancé.”
“Most of my friends, boys and girls, went away,” Ela Stein says. “Honza Gelbkopf was gone, and nearly all the boys from Home 9. My uncle Otto left with the last transport on October 28. There was no time to say goodbye. There was no pa
use. Everything happened so quickly.”
“One transport after the other left,” Flaška recalls. “One girlfriend after the other left. Our counselors. My brother Michael left on September 28 and my sister Lizzi on October 19. I accompanied them as far as the sluice, which was forbidden and very dangerous. Sometimes people who weren’t on the list were shoved onto a car at the last moment and the doors were closed behind them.”
“You cannot imagine the kinds of things that happened there at the sluice,” says Eva Herrmann, who wore a red armband as a transport aide. “And it was organized so that everyone had to line up by number— everyone had a number. Then they walked toward the cars and the numbers were called out, from one to one thousand, to one thousand five hundred, to two thousand. … You had the feeling that as long as they were in the barracks they were still in Theresienstadt. But when they went out that gate—there stood the SS, who took charge with their shouting and stomping, with boots and clubs and everything else! If one of the older people didn’t move fast enough or there was someone with children—the scenes we were forced to watch were lessons in horror. People didn’t really know what was happening to them. They only knew that they were leaving, but didn’t know where they were headed.”11
Thursday, October 12, 1944 (Otto Pollak’s diary)
Sunny day. At eleven in the morning I manage with some difficulty to make my way to the Hamburg sluice. Last goodbyes with Marta and Fritz. Marta deeply touched. Weeping, she expresses her fear that we’ll not see each other again. Helga and I remain behind alone.
Sunday, October 15, 1944
The Hechts, Hugo, Grünbaum, Kopper, and Helga’s best friend Hanna Lissau are summoned. At three-thirty in the afternoon a difficult goodbye with the Hechts. With them I lose my last friends. From the steps I call out to them not to lose heart. Helga is on night duty and visits the Hechts at the sluice. I look out on the street early in the morning. The boarding of the cars is in high gear.
Monday, October 16, 1944
Around five in the morning Helga quietly enters the room. I turn on a light. My child, breaking into tears, reports that the train rolled out at five o’clock. The pain in Helga’s soul is very great. She stopped at Genie Barracks and watched the train pull out, until the last car was lost from sight. She saw Hugo being boarded on a litter and noticed how all the baggage of the blind was left behind.
Tuesday, October 17, 1944
Hugo’s will, made as he said goodbye on Sunday: My heirs are my brother’s three children. Amid his tears he told me this while gazing out the window. Another transport leaves tomorrow. Helga remarks about these summonses: “A single piece of paper decides a person’s fate.”
“I received my orders to be transported in October,” Eva Winkler recalls. “Just me. Not my mother, not my father. My father did everything he could to get me removed from the list. He went to the Council of Elders and told them either the whole family goes or I have to stay here. It was my good luck that my father was needed. I was already in the Hamburg Barracks. I can still see the lines of people with transport numbers on the tags around their necks, and I can hear them being called out, one, two, three … and then watching as people climb into the cattle cars. Then, at the last moment, my father arrived and pulled me off the transport.”
“It was one of the last transports in late October. And needless to say, as a fourteen-year-old girl, I was put on it alone,” says Vera Nath. “I wasn’t doing any important work. My sister was working at the Kursawe villa, my mother in the mica works,12 my father in the Kleiderkammer. Their work was very important. I received my summons for a transport leaving on Sunday, October 22, 1944. When they put me on the list my father went to Murmelstein and begged him to take me off the transport. And Murmelstein said, ‘You can go as well. You and your wife and your daughter.’ And he put us all on the transport list.
“We were in the sluice for two days, and our things were already loaded and our numbers had been called. As my father passed by Rahm, Rahm said, ‘Nath, what are you up to?’ My father said that I was on the transport and he couldn’t let me go alone. And Rahm said, ‘I need you. Stay here with your family’ And so we stayed.”
“My father didn’t even try to get us off the transport,” recalls Judith Schwarzbart, who also received her orders to be transported in late October. “My mother didn’t want him to. She hoped to see my brother Gideon again, who had left in May. And shortly before we left, my father called me to him—he probably guessed that he wouldn’t be coming back—and he said just these words to me: ‘Stay just as you are.’ And then we all boarded the transport.”
Of the girls in Room 28, the following boarded the October 1944 transports: Jiřinka Steiner and the counselor Eva Eckstein on October 1; Ruth Meisl on October 4; Ruth Gutmann on October 6; Eva Heller on October 12; Eva Fischl, Hana Lissau, and Maria Mühlstein on October 16; Emma Taub on October 19; Marta Kende, Helga Pollak, Handa Pollak, Eva Stern, and Marianne’s friend Hana Brady on October 23; Lenka Lindt and Judith Schwarzbart on October 28.
Room 28, all the Girls’ Homes, the Boys’ Homes, the Children’s Homes, the barracks, and all living quarters—they were all being emptied out, day after day. Left behind in the ghetto were the Danes, a few Dutch, women and girls who labored in the mica works, and those who, like Ela’s mother, worked in the fields under the Czech supervisor Karel Kursawe. Experts who were important to the SS and highly decorated or wounded veterans from the First World War, such as Leo Flach and Otto Pollak, also remained.
Transport summons dated October 22, 1944, from the papers of Otto Pollak
The dedications and good wishes in Flaška’s poetry album were left behind as well:
Just as this big mushroom protects the little mushroom, that’s how our Home protects us. But after a while we will have to protect others. And so prepare yourself, for you will have to pay back the loan someday. Never reflect for long if you can do a good deed, and never lose hope. Without hope you cannot exist. And keep remembering those you were fond of. And never forget those who are like me.
Your Fiška
Terezin, October 5, 1944
Think back now and then to our Home in Theresienstadt and don’t be annoyed if I annoyed you sometimes.
Ruthka (Plzeň Bezovka 9)
Ruth Gutmann
October 5, 1944
Always remember our Room 28, think of what we learned there, what we strove for, and organize your life according to the rules that we learned there.
Tella
October 5, 1944
Dear Flaška,
Never forget what we have experienced together. The way we sang and dreamed, and the concerts with Baštík. Never forget what was beautiful about our Home. Good luck, and don’t upset your mother. Kisses from your
Maria Mühlstein
P.S.: Don’t be annoyed that I’ve written such nonsense. You wanted me to write something.
October 13, 1944
I am sorry, but I have to write similar thoughts for you as I wrote for the other girls. But you need to know that Theresienstadt was also a good school for us, despite all the bad things. You came here as a little child, without character, but under the influence of our Home you have acquired character. And I believe you have the will to be a good person.
Hana Lissau
October 14, 1944
Fiška’s entry in Flaška’s poetry album
There is no end. A new era always follows. Each person has his goal, and whoever wants to achieve that goal has a great many difficulties and a long struggle ahead. A person has to struggle in the face of adversity. People who have no will never achieve their goals. But if you keep up the struggle and never stop, even if you are defeated, you come closer to your goal. This struggle is the struggle of the will. Even an individual who is physically quite weak can have a strong will.
Eli Mühlstein
October 15, 1944
Human beings are in this world to do good. Anyone who does not abide by that has no
right to be a human being. If you want to fulfill your mission on this earth, act accordingly and live by the principles that Tella has taught us. Whenever you’re in doubt, think back to what she would have done. I believe that she is the most flawless person I know.
In memory of my sweetheart,
Lenka Lindt
October 15, 1944
Helga’s entry in Flaška’s poetry album
Always remember, dear Flaška, that there were times here in Theresienstadt when we lived lazily through each day and never gave up hope that peace will come.
Handa Pollak
Dear Flaška!
I hope that we will see each other again out in beautiful nature, where everything is fresh and fragrant, where we can breathe free and realize our ideas and not live as we did here in this prison cell. And when we are older and a little wiser, there will perhaps come an evening when the stars shine in a dark sky, lending the sea its silvery luster, and we shall sit beside the shore and think of our friends and the cares that we once had so many years before in Theresienstadt.
Helga
October 22, 1944