Born Survivors (15 page)

The Germans who formed the
Lagerkommandantur
summoned the Jewish elders and a few select witnesses to assemble in the square near the Aussig barracks where gallows had been erected. Then they publicly hanged a group of nine young men who’d ‘insulted German honour’ by trying to smuggle ‘unauthorised correspondence’ to their families. Further hangings followed, including those of seven young men who were executed for a variety of minor misdemeanours like the theft of sweets and the possession of cigarettes.

Shaken, Anka said, ‘There were about six punishments like this and that brought us back down to earth with a bang and made us realise that it wouldn’t be easy to survive. From then on we started to be much more careful and worried ourselves sick because we didn’t know what was going to happen.’

As an ‘avalanche’ of people continued to arrive from Germany and Austria, the regulations passed by the Nazi command became increasingly stringent. A fresh wave of prohibitions forbade the inmates from being in certain parts of the ghetto at certain times of day or from doing everyday activities. More fences and security
barriers were erected and sentries posted. Main streets had to be kept clear and people could only use the back alleyways. Those who infringed the rules could be beaten or shot. Others were taken to the Small Fortress, rarely to return.

To save electricity, people were often confined to barracks for
Lichtsperre
– lights out – and could only undress by touch or read by the light of candles, which were in short supply. Lying on a dirty mattress, itching from bites, the air around her unendurable, Anka could not help but recall the romantic candlelit nights she and Bernd used to enjoy in their Prague apartment. There was also a plague of fleas and bedbugs to contend with, as well as the gnawing hunger. Once winter came it was a struggle to find wood to light a stove in order to heat a room or warm food. Rations of coal were only allowed if the temperature dropped below zero. ‘People started to die like flies because of malnutrition, bad housing, lack of washing facilities,’ Anka said. ‘It was fatal for old people.’

In this place of famine, the food situation became unbearable for many and animal instincts took over. Survival often depended on how accomplished a thief one became. ‘Everybody who could, stole,’ Anka said. ‘If anyone tells you that they didn’t steal, don’t believe them.’ Those who worked in the kitchens hid potatoes or even peelings which they later sold or bartered. Anka learned how to make soup from nettles and constantly took the opportunity of grabbing something from the kitchens, and then trying to exchange a single blackened potato for a soggy onion.

Her luck changed once when she accidentally received a parcel of Portuguese sardines destined for another woman named Nanny Nathan who had perished. Anka pointed out the error to the Jewish post office, but was told she could keep the parcel anyway. ‘I gladly accepted it but we had so many sardines that we couldn’t even eat them any more. My husband would ask, “Sardines again?” … One gets so ungrateful!’

Even though so many had died, there was never enough room for newcomers – especially those expected from Austria and Germany –
so in January 1942 the transports East began, each made up of between one and five thousand souls. As in Łódź and the other ghettos, people ran around trying to beg or bribe officials to remove their loved ones from the lists, but it often had little effect and they watched their numbers melt away. The first deportees from Terezín were sent initially to a ghetto in Riga, Latvia, then to ghettos in occupied Poland, but few had any idea where they were going. ‘It was just dreadful when you saw those people on stretchers, old and incapable of going from here to there, being transported God knows where … Thousands of people arrived only to be sent further East in a few days … Thousands came, thousands died, thousands went off. 1942 came and went. 1943 carried on in the same way.’

The transports became a kind of terrorism – a threat that overshadowed everything. Nobody knew what the next day would bring and the fear ground down their already sinking morale. Of the 140,000 Jews sent to Terezín, an estimated 33,000 people were to die and more than 88,000 were sent to death camps as Jewish life in Czechoslovakia was all but eradicated. Fifteen thousand were children, including 1,260 who’d been promised safe passage to Switzerland and had volunteers to escort them, almost all of whom were executed in Auschwitz.

The ‘pioneers’, like Anka and Bernd, still clung to the hope that the promise made to them meant they would avoid such a fate, but they had no guarantees. ‘You never knew when you might be sent or at what interval,’ she said. ‘Today? Next week? Next month? All we knew was that “East” meant something dreadful and everyone tried to avoid such a transport.’

As conditions worsened, the Gestapo sold imaginary plots of land and ‘admission rights’ for privileged German Jews to move to Terezín, which they variously dubbed a country resort with free housing and medical care, a
Reichsalterheim
or state old people’s home, and a
Bad
or spa. Many paid extra for a room ‘with a view’ or a penthouse apartment, not appreciating until it was too late that they had been swindled. Those who arrived expecting a pleasant
resort where they could safely sit out the war were shocked by the conditions. Imagining a rich social life with like-minded people, they brought tiaras and top hats, jewels and sequinned gowns, which quickly became crumpled and stained. Instead they found grubby scenes of Dickensian hopelessness punctuated only by the ever-present fear of what lay at the far end of the railway tracks.

‘That was the first time I came across old people who should have been in [a] hospital … who travelled I don’t know how long and we had to take care of them. It was just inhuman. There wasn’t any room for them,’ said Anka. ‘They didn’t know where to stay … they were packed into the lofts of those little houses that were made into dormitories … and they had to climb up and down and they couldn’t.’

Plagues of flies descended in summers that fell hot and heavy without a breath of wind. Epidemics of encephalitis, diphtheria and dysentery wiped out hundreds who lost control of their bowels and died lying in their own excrement. Wagons carried away the dead, whose bony feet stuck out beneath their shrouds. Special delousing stations were set up to disinfect clothes and belongings with insecticide.

In spite of their worsening situation, or perhaps because of it, the remaining inmates created a rich artistic life within the ghetto walls. Terezín was filled with some of Europe’s finest artists, intellectuals, composers and performers who devised increasingly innovative means of warding off their growing despair. Children and adults staged plays and recitals, and were encouraged to express themselves through art and poetry. Materials were begged, borrowed or stolen, and young and old shared splinters of charcoal or the nubs of crayons to draw on pages cut from ledgers or the endpapers of books.

Their imprisonment seemed to spark a flurry of creativity. Some made collages from scraps of cardboard and cloth. One young man named Pavel Friedman wrote a poem on a flimsy piece of copy paper: ‘I never saw another butterfly … Butterflies don’t live here.
In the ghetto.’ He was twenty-three years old when he was sent to his death in Auschwitz. Artists who’d secretly made drawings depicting the worst conditions in the ghetto were taken to the Small Fortress to be tortured and have their fingers broken. Many were shot or sent away to concentration camps.

In spite of the constant threat of reprisals, the cultural revolution went on. Mini-exhibitions, musical reviews and concerts were secretly arranged. The impromptu theatrics began quietly in basements and barracks but became so popular that they were later staged in warehouses or exercise halls. The Jewish administration, which had to approve each performance, began to issue tickets; these became highly sought after and were often exchanged for food on the black market.

When the Germans didn’t step in to crush such activities – they even allowed musical instruments – people became bolder and began to stage major productions. Architects and set designers were put to work and seamstresses enlisted to make costumes. Writers were encouraged to pen satirical plays and cabarets, including one called
Posledni Cyklista
(The Last Cyclist) by playwright Karel Švenk, which depicted a world in which people with bicycles were persecuted by inmates who’d escaped from an asylum. Sadly, it was never performed in Terezín, having been banned at the dress rehearsal by the Council of Elders for fear of reprisals. But after the war – which Švenk didn’t survive – it was recreated from memory by survivors and continues to be played to audiences around the world.

Other less controversial shows were allowed to go ahead, including operas such as
Aida
, featuring famous soloists from across Europe. There were more than fifty performances of an opera for children by Hans Krasa called
Brundibar
. This was put on thanks largely to the producer František Zelenka, the most influential and innovative Czech set designer of his era. After helping to stage more than twenty plays in Terezín, including works by Shakespeare and Molière, Zelenka was to perish in Auschwitz aged forty-two.

Anka watched a memorable dress rehearsal of
The Bartered Bride
, a comic opera she’d first seen as a carefree student. Even though she thought the woman playing the bride was too old for the role, it was still ‘fantastic’ because of its optimism. ‘When it was first composed no one knew it would be used at Terezín but in it were quite a few songs and sayings that had everything to do with being there … There is one sentence where she asks him, “And what will happen in the end?” and he answers, “It will be all right!” … It was so symbolic. Moments like that were unforgettable.’

For the hour or two that these performances lasted, those in the audience were no longer prisoners whose only thoughts were about food or fears for their own survival. Instead they were free to laugh and cry, feel hopeful and sad, transported as they were to happier times by music, dance and song. ‘It all helped to ease the atmosphere,’ Anka said. ‘Through [the] arts you could let go.’

One of the most remarkable artistic achievements in Terezín was created thanks to a dedicated amateur choir under the direction of the Romanian conductor and chamber musician Rafael Schächter. Between them, this prison chorus put on no fewer than sixteen performances of Verdi’s most demanding work –
Requiem
. The fiery Catholic funeral mass was learned by rote – note by note, Latin word by Latin word – in a cold, dank basement. Using only a smuggled score, one piano (with missing legs), and a cast that frequently changed as the transports wrenched more of its voices away, Schächter told his choir, ‘We will sing to the Nazis what we cannot say to them.’

One of the lines in
Libera me
(Liberate me) is ‘Deliver me, Lord, from eternal death … when you will come to judge the world by fire.’ Another states that ‘Nothing will remain unpunished’ on the Day of Reckoning. It was a defiant message of holy judgement on all sinners. Anka, who was at one performance attended by senior Nazi officials, said it was the most heartbreakingly moving thing she ever heard. When it was over, the Jews in the audience sat
breathless, waiting for the Germans’ reaction. Once the SS began to clap, everyone else did too, their faces wet with tears.

As part of their ongoing artistic resistance under the supervision of the
Freizeitgestaltung
, or Administration for Free Time Activities, the people of Terezín also organised lectures and classes, sewing bees and improvement programmes. If they weren’t taking part in one of the artistic or educational events for their own intellectual nourishment or that of others, they were trying to upgrade their quarters.

In open defiance of the threat of death that hung over them, the Jews chose life. As part of their private rebellion, they sang, they danced, they fell in love, they married, and – desperate for love and some sort of physical contact – they tried to find comfort wherever they could.

Bernd worked in a specialist workshop and timber yard in the
Bauhof
or Block H, which was within the ramparts beyond the barbed wire. One of his jobs was to make fine furniture for the Nazi officers, just as he had done in Prague. When he finished work he would sneak into his wife’s barracks to visit her. There was no privacy but neither was there any shame. They weren’t the only ones who felt that way, and many couples rented private rooms from the privileged few who had access to them. Others had to make do with whatever time they could find together and, on some nights, when a few men were able to creep into the female barracks, Anka said she could feel the whole place shaking. ‘We were twelve women in a room and sometimes there were twelve men who slept in there at the same time and nobody took any notice,’ she said. ‘It was one of the few pleasures left and it kept us alive.’ It was quite a risk, but one they considered worth taking. They were young and in love, and lying together for a few hours gave them hope.

The departure of so many others on the transports, while they remained behind, convinced the couple that the Nazis’ promise about the ‘pioneers’ being safe would be kept and that they would most likely remain in the ghetto for the duration of the war. Even though a dedicated rail spur had been built right into the heart of
the ghetto in June 1943, Anka still believed – as so many did – that the war would soon end.

At twenty-six years of age and having been married for three years, Anka didn’t want to wait to be a mother until she was too old, but nonetheless she and Bernd decided against having a child in the circumstances. Although it was never specifically stated, the Germans had decreed a strict segregation of the sexes and it was feared that the ‘crime’ of falling pregnant might be punishable by death. However, when Anka found out in the summer of 1943 that she was expecting a baby, she was secretly delighted. Her mother Ida, who by then shared the same barracks with her daughter, asked incredulously, ‘How? When?’ and when Anka shrugged her shoulders, Ida laughed. Anka convinced herself that perhaps the baby was meant to be. Nine months felt such a long time and anything might happen by then. Through illegal radios and gossip from the Czech police, snippets of news reached the Terezín grapevine. Sicily had been invaded, Mussolini had been ousted from power and Italy had surrendered to the Allies. There had been a mass uprising in the Warsaw ghetto and the German Ruhr had been heavily bombed. For many, it seemed that the end was finally in sight.