Prague Winter

by Madeleine Albright

  With so many prisoners and so few guards, Terezín had an abundance of rules that were frequently broken. Despite the risk of getting caught, there were still tunnels that could be found for private assignations;* young Zionists carved out space in a bakery attic to install a suitcase-size radio tuned to the BBC; and gardeners and kitchen workers devised ways to conceal food in their clothes. One twelve-year-old farmworker was able to hijack a single cherry, which she presented to her parents. Her father, the former chief of medical services at Prague’s Jewish hospital, painstakingly cut the fruit into three equal portions.

  Everyone between the ages of sixteen and sixty-five was obliged to work if physically able. Inmates were commanded to labor in mines and construction, to grow food and tend livestock, to mend German military uniforms and split mica for insulation in electronic devices.

  By the end of 1942, life at Terezín had begun to develop a unique identity. The Germans had done all they could to rob the Jews of their dignity, and certainly the miserable conditions had a Darwinian effect on behavior. Those who adapted quickly and who learned how to curry favor and scrounge food survived longest, but amid the horror and death there also emerged an astonishing display of life.

  From a standing start, the ghetto’s Jewish administrators were able to improvise a rudimentary system of public services, including electric power, sanitation, security, law, and, with respect to shelter, making the best of a bad lot. As for education, Germans in the protectorate had scoffed that—in their brave new world—Czechs would have no practical use for schooling beyond the eighth grade, while Jews would have no need for it at all. Following this logic, academic classes were banned in Terezín, but the prohibition was overwhelmed in practice by the prisoners’ desire to learn and to teach. Whatever their preferred language, inmates respected knowledge; many were scholars, and some possessed world-class expertise. The pool of qualified lecturers and instructors ran deep.

  Although classes might be interrupted at any time, they were generally conducted for several hours a day in dormitories, cellars, attics—whatever was available. A lookout was posted to warn of approaching SS. In the event of an inspection, students were adept at hiding their lesson papers and pretending to be engaged in a permitted activity, such as singing, drawing pictures, or cleaning their cluttered rooms.

  Academics at Terezín were not just a means of therapy. The imprisoned children were among the most broadly educated in the Reich. Their counterparts in Prague, Vienna, or Berlin were taught only what the German authorities thought essential. The educators at Terezín had nothing more to lose. If all teaching was illegal, why not provide instruction in the history of Judaism, Greek ethics, moral philosophy, and the poetry of Heinrich Heine? Why not organize study circles that delved into Russian and Latin? Why not devote evenings to cultural events that featured lectures, poetry, plays, and songs sung not only in German but in Hebrew and Czech? Why not enjoy plays based on Sholem Aleichem’s tales of Tevya the Milkman?

  Especially in the first two years of the ghetto, expectations were high that the children, at least, would survive. Yet even when such optimism became harder to sustain, the classes continued with undiminished vigor. To teach a doomed child about moral choices was itself a moral choice—and a brave one.

  Health care too presented a paradox. There, deep in the Valley of the Shadow, heroic efforts were made to prevent infection and to treat injuries and disease. It helped that the camp possessed some five hundred doctors, albeit many who were elderly. The health care system was short of medications and chronically overwhelmed by demand, yet the survival rate for such diseases as scarlet fever and diphtheria was well above 90 percent. The camp also benefited from surgical equipment scavenged from the protectorate’s Jewish hospitals, now closed. Thousands of dental, eye, and other operations were performed.

  THIS WAS THE environment that prevailed when, on November 26, 1942, Rudolf Deiml, his wife, Greta, and young Milena arrived at the ghetto in company with most of the Jewish population of Strakonice. The trip had been a cold one. According to a neighbor, the snow had been so heavy that “most people couldn’t carry their packages and put them, one on top of the other, on the side of the road. . . . In the railway carriage the seats were covered with a thin layer of ice.” Still, at fifty-two, Rudolf was better prepared than his father-in-law had been to survive the rigors of bitter weather and of Terezín. He was also an outgoing man with a physician’s skills that were always in demand. Greta, for her part, hoped to devote her time to caring for children.

  I can only imagine the emotions that churned through my aunt and uncle as they exchanged their familiar surroundings for the uncertainties of Terezín; the same is true of the mixed feelings with which I suspect they were received by Grandmother Olga. Anywhere else, she would have been overjoyed, but to see them and especially Milena consigned to prison existence would have generated much anxiety and sadness.

  Still, there was no choice. Before long Rudolf was supervising health care in a barracks for women and young children. Greta, although separated from her husband, was able to see Milena regularly, as she was assigned to look after girls in the room next to her daughter’s. Like most, the rooms were crowded; forty or more lived in each. Greta and other women played with the girls and made sure they washed and tidied their beds each morning. Meals, prepared in large vats, consisted of watery soup, bits of potato, stale bread, and the occasional spoonful of marmalade.

  Surrounded by squalor, Olga, Greta, and Milena must have drawn strength from one another. Terezín, however, was the enemy even of small comforts. An epidemic of typhoid fever broke out among the children, roughly 125 of whom were infected in January and 400 more in February. Parents became frightened. The Germans, who fretted about the dangers of contagion, also worried. A prominent Nazi doctor was called in from Prague to analyze the crisis. Himmler, scheduled to visit, suddenly found he had pressing engagements elsewhere.

  Frantic efforts were made to trace the epidemic to its source. The children’s kitchen was suspected, but none of the inmates who worked there was sick. The toll mounted. Twelve-year-old Helga Weissová wrote in her diary, “Lilka’s sister has died. Lilka has typhoid, too. Vera, Olina, and Marta are in the infirmary. Milča was taken to Hohenelbe barracks yesterday. They say she’s dying.”

  Two of the adult women who cared for the children also contracted the disease. One of them was my aunt Greta Deimlová. She died, after a ten-day illness, on February 15, 1943.

  MILENA NO LONGER had a mother to care for her, and her father was still with the men in the barracks. Under the rules, she was assigned to a three-story house, designated L-410, which provided lodging for about 360 girls ages eight to eighteen, the majority of whom were Czech. There she was exposed to a new routine. The day began at 7 a.m. Those who awakened first sprinted for the bathroom to avoid standing in line. Hands were given a squirt of Lysol beneath the watchful eye of an older woman, whose constant refrain was “Wash your hands before you eat / And when you get off the toilet seat.”

  Beds were then aired and sheets shaken out in a largely vain effort to prevent infestations of bedbugs and lice. Next came the roll call and the assignment of tasks—to clean, mend, fetch, pick up food, run errands. Some of the girls were part of an organization called Yad Ozeret (“Helping Hand” in Hebrew). They volunteered to assist older prisoners by carrying luggage, reciting poems, and enlivening birthday celebrations.

  Before and after chores, there was
plenty of time for school. Milena was among those receiving instruction from a forty-four-year-old protégée of Paul Klee, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, who in the 1930s had moved from Vienna to Prague, where she had maintained a children’s art studio. At Terezín, her students included the girls of L-410.

  “You didn’t have to draw well,” recalled Helga Weissová. “That was not what really mattered; the crucial thing was that you developed your talents, that you learned to see. To recognize colors. To play with colors.” Dicker-Brandeis taught the girls to draw in response to stories, wishes, ideas, even rhythms rapped out on a table. “One day, she would offer a theme,” wrote Weissová, “an animal in a landscape, or would simply say, ‘Storm, wind, evening—paint it!’ Another day, she would sketch a fantasy story in a few sentences or would say nothing more than ‘Paint where you would like to be now.’ ”

  Nothing came easy in Terezín. Dicker-Brandeis was primarily a German speaker; art supplies and paper were scarce. Nevertheless, the children produced more than four thousand drawings in pencil, crayon, and watercolor; the subjects included virtually everything except what was not permitted—life as it truly was inside Terezín. Many of the illustrations survived; when the ghetto was liberated a pair of suitcases was found in one of the children’s rooms, each crammed with pictures, among them many of Milena’s. From the evidence, my young cousin loved to try her hand at portraits, trains, houses, baby carriages, and a variety of animals, including dogs, pigs, horses, and camels. The sun is almost always present, sometimes smiling, sometimes not. Today, a selection of art from the children of Terezín, including one of Milena’s, is on exhibit in the Jewish Museum in Prague.

  Drawing by Milena Deimlová

  Jewish Museum in Prague Photo Archive collections

  Around the corner from L-410 was L-417, formerly a municipal school, converted into a dormitory for Czech boys. It was there that one of the more remarkable literary creations of Terezín was produced. Each week, the residents of Terezín put together several magazines, including Vedem (In the Lead). Since reproduction was not possible, only a single copy was created. On Friday nights, the boys gathered to read their contributions aloud. Selections included poems, satire, essays on prison governance, and interviews with such ghetto celebrities as the cook, the chief engineer, the nurse, or the head of police. The editor was Petr Ginz, an improbably precocious fifteen-year-old son of a Catholic mother and Jewish father. Possessed of a boundless appetite for self-improvement, Ginz was to be seen almost every evening sitting cross-legged on his bunk, surrounded by writing and painting supplies.

  For a short time, Petr kept a journal in which he vowed to devote greater effort to drawing, bookbinding, increasing his weight, the study of Buddhism, linocuts, stenography, English, Russian, Plato, and Balzac. As for maintaining a diary, he had second thoughts. “I hereby declare,” began his entry for February 16, 1944, “that keeping a diary is stupid because you write things in it that one should keep forever to oneself.”

  In one of the essays Ginz wrote for Vedem, he compared the attitude of many at Terezín to a Manchu expression, “Mey fah zu,” or “It can’t be helped”:

  Manchuria is not the only place there are Manchus. There are plenty of them here, too. Are we in Terezín? Mey fah zu. Are we sweating like pigs? Mey fah zu. They take everything as given, unpleasant to be sure, but unchangeable. Is there favoritism here? Can’t be helped. Favoritism is as immutable, as natural as the rotation of the earth or gravitation. It was so in the past, it will be so again. Mey fah zu.

  Inside the ghetto, hunger was constant and so was filth—laundry privileges came along but every six weeks. It was a common sight to see men on their way to the crematory pulling carts filled with human bodies. The same wagons were used for transporting loaves of bread. Most wretched were the aged, who, deprived of equal rations and often without family to send packages from the outside, were just alive enough to shuffle about the camp scrounging for food. This was an image of shrunken humanity, skeletons barely covered with skin and sores, unable to clean themselves or to converse intelligibly. To ghetto residents, such an existence must have seemed worse than death.

  The central uncertainty looming over the camp was embodied in the mysterious transports to the east, which started, then stopped, then started again. Not even the Jewish Council had much notice of when the trains would depart, nor did its members know where they went, though the prevailing guess was to vaguely defined work camps in Poland. The more realistic prisoners understood that whatever the destination, it was probably worse than Terezín. Some who could not imagine such a place volunteered for the transports—especially if loved ones had already been commanded to go.

  The Germans were intent on implementing the Final Solution but not on publicizing it. To the end, they would insist that they were sending prisoners to locations where the inmates could expect to survive and even to live together as families. They were generally indifferent as to which Jews went on the transports—although, for a time, persons married to Aryans and those holding German war decorations were exempt. With characteristic sadism, the Nazis left to the elders the responsibility for deciding who would go, dictating only the number of passengers and whether they should be young, old, possessed of certain skills, or of a particular nationality.

  The task of selecting victims created a hideous moral dilemma for Jewish leaders. Names were added, then scratched out, according to such subjective criteria as ideological affinity, family connections, language, nationality, and degree of personal hardship. Each time an exception was made, another prisoner had to take his or her place. The most vulnerable were orphaned teenagers, who had no one to speak for them. Inevitably, the power wielded by the council caused resentment. Its members had more comfortable housing, fuller dinner plates, and cleaner clothes; they were also in a position to help their friends. Inmates referred derisively to the importance of vitamins B (Beziehung, or connection) and P (Protektion). Gonda Redlich, the council member responsible for youths, complained, “The elders will never agree to cutting back on a morsel of their rights.”* He went on to ask, “Is a man who is given two portions of food fit to judge a thief who is given only one portion, when he tries to take a second from the kitchen?”

  How to discern, in such a place, the difference between right and wrong? Vera Schiff, only seventeen, worked in the Terezín hospital. One night a renowned surgeon hurried in with a bundle in his arms. Vera pulled back the blanket to discover a newborn child, whom the doctor begged her to kill. The infant’s mother had arrived at Terezín only a few days previously and had managed to conceal her condition. To give birth at the camp was a capital crime. The doctor knew the mother and wished to save her life, but to harm the newborn would violate his Hippocratic oath. He prepared a syringe and implored Vera to use it. Her reaction:

  Although I was not bound by any oath, I found it impossible to calmly take the syringe, inject the baby, and walk away. We were both unnerved by the deliberate act of extinguishing a life, even the life of a baby who was doomed to die, even if it was to try to save the life of the mother.

  We exchanged a pained and embarrassed glance. Then the boy began to whine, making Dr. Freund’s flesh creep. Coldly and tensely, he snapped that we would do it together. Before I could say anything, he grabbed my hand, pushed the syringe into it, and with his hand wrapped around mine, he forced the needle into the baby’s thigh.

  According to official records, the child had never existed. The do
ctor had betrayed his oath and implicated an innocent girl in his crime, all to do what was—in his judgment—the right thing. Surely the blame rests not with those forced to make such choices but with those responsible for creating the circumstances in which such choices must be made.

  19

  The Bridge Too Far

  Hitler’s fateful decision to invade Russia had left his troops exposed to the same three indomitable warriors—October, November, and December—that had foiled Napoleon more than a century before. In January 1943, the German Sixth Army surrendered to Soviet forces after the failure of a prolonged and bitter siege of Stalingrad. Allied troops, having finally prevailed in the deserts of North Africa, prepared to pressure Hitler from the south through Sicily, then the Italian mainland. Churchill and Roosevelt, meeting in Casablanca, vowed to demand Germany’s unconditional surrender. In England the mood was beginning to brighten despite the ongoing blackout. “Hitler and his lot are moaning at present,” wrote a woman from a village near Coventry, “and we—well, we are feeling much bettah!”

  Beneš, too, was upbeat. “Our cause is internationally assured,” he told his advisers. “Our government in exile has been recognized by all the democratic countries. We have a treaty of alliance with Britain; we have renewed the French-Czechoslovak treaty with de Gaulle. The allied powers have declared the Munich agreement null and void. The time has come to sign a treaty with the Soviet Union.”

  Establishing a firm bond with Moscow was an essential element in Beneš’s postwar strategy. Munich would not have happened, he argued, had the British been less distrustful of the Soviets. If his people were to be safe, the partnership between Russia and the West must continue. Yes, the Soviet leaders were totalitarian, but that was to be expected, given the country’s czarist tradition. Prolonged exposure to the West would surely have a liberalizing effect, a process that Czechoslovakia, with its democratic values, could help to speed. Whether or not that hope was realized, Beneš believed that his country needed a powerful friend. Even in defeat, Germany, Hungary, and Austria would still loom, encircling and menacing. He no longer had faith in Western promises; Moscow was to be courted.