Born Survivors (14 page)

After three sleepless days and nights locked in the building, trying to sleep curled up on the floor, even Anka almost gave up trying to look presentable. More and more people arrived, although there was no room for them. Her box of doughnuts became soggier and heavier, and still she resisted the temptation to eat its contents or give it up. Eventually, they were mustered into columns and marched the thirty minutes or so to the railway station. On the pavements stood Jews and Gentiles, silently watching them go and wondering who’d be next. Unable to witness the humiliating spectacle, many turned away in shame and embarrassment, their cheeks wet with tears.

The route was lined with scores of young Nazi officers. Anka was accompanied by a girlfriend named Mitzka, who pleaded with one of them to help Anka with her hatbox, which was in danger of slipping from her arms. Only just out of his teens, the baby-faced soldier snapped, ‘
Es ist scheiss egal ob die Schachtel mitkommt
’ (‘I couldn’t give a shit if that box comes or not’). His words sent a shiver down Anka’s spine as she sensed that it wouldn’t matter either way.

The train to Terezín pulled second-class carriages into which its 1,000 passengers were inhumanely forced for transportation to
Bohušovice nad Ohří station on the main line north from Prague. From there they had to march two and a half kilometres to the ghetto, trudging through snow and past frozen fields, flanked by a cordon of armed Czech and SS guards. The heavier bags were loaded onto wooden carts by a special transport squad pulled by young men, but most of the luggage – especially hatboxes – had to be carried, and ‘on the double’.

Terezín, with its imposing redbrick ramparts and impenetrable perimeter walls, loomed vast and sprawling ahead of them. ‘It was well suited to the purpose the Germans wanted it for,’ Anka said. Behind the high wooden fencing and menacing rings of barbed wire, the town itself was extremely dilapidated but still rather handsome, with a symmetrical grid of wide boulevards around a grand central square called the
Marktplatz
(marketplace). To begin with, the area was out of bounds for Jews and covered incongruously by a circus tent that hid a production line in which slave labourers filled engine parts with anti-freeze. The surrounding streets were lined with crumbling four-storey barracks, ideal for swallowing huge numbers of people, with street after street of smaller houses, garages and stables beyond.

Within minutes of passing through one of the four main gates that separated them from the rest of the world, the transportees arrived in an outer courtyard to be counted, catalogued and searched by German guards and the one hundred or so Czech gendarmes or police. These early newcomers were allowed to keep most of their belongings and allocated housing by the ghetto’s Jewish administrators.

Men were separated from their wives and billeted in eleven
Kaserne
(garrisons), all named after German cities such as Ham burg, Dresden and Magdeburg, while children were placed in
Kinderheime
or children’s homes. In dusty, unheated buildings infested with vermin, they were placed in three-tier bunks twenty to a room and given palliasses, musty straw mattresses, to lie on in a space of precisely 1.6 square metres each. There were no cupboards, so people
stashed their belongings under the bunks or hung their clothes from nails. Wet washing was strung between bunks, never to properly dry. As in the occupied world beyond, all were subject to restrictions and a curfew.

Bunks in the Magdeburg barracks, Terezín

Anka was young, strong, healthy and optimistic when she arrived in Terezín on Sunday, 14 December 1941. Her initial reaction to her crowded first-floor room was that the place ‘wasn’t too bad’ and that they could survive. They had a pump that brought (polluted) water from a well, cooking facilities, latrines, kitchens, and a basic system of administration. After making enquiries, she found out that Bernd was in the all-male Sudeten barracks in the western bastion, not too far away. Just as she was carving out a space for herself, a few girlfriends already living in the ghetto found her and Mitzka and cried, ‘You can’t stay here!’ They grabbed her things and moved
her to their room of just twelve in the Dresden barracks so that they could all be together. Surrounded by such friends, Anka felt as if she was on an adventure.

Best of all, later that night she was reunited with Bernd when the men were given special passes and allowed into their section to welcome their wives. Triumphant, she was finally able to present him with the well-travelled doughnuts, which were by then stale and soggy. ‘He still ate them happily!’

Nobody was allowed out of their barracks unless they had a signed permit or a police escort, but just as Anka and Bernd had flouted the laws in Prague, so they did now. Punishments included imprisonment in the ghetto jail or floggings, but the couple still managed to find ways of meeting. By each discovering where the other would be working and making short risky detours, they were able to spend a few clandestine moments together.

The
Ältestenrat
or Jewish Elders placed in overall charge of the alphabetically lettered streets within the fortress walls allocated jobs for every person over fourteen. Hundreds worked an average seventy-hour week on construction, in the kitchens, the laundry or the administrative offices. Others made Nazi uniforms or clothes for German civilians. Some had the unenviable job of cleaning the latrines or were formed into disinfecting brigades to try to reduce the risks of infection. Within a year, bricklayers were set to work building a crematorium for the hundreds who were expected to die, even though cremation defied the Jewish faith, which considers it a desecration of the body and decrees that burial only is allowed.

Bernd – assigned to the carpentry division – was given the task of building more bunks, as well as of transforming derelict barracks and converting houses. He was also signed up to be a
Ghettowache
(ghetto guard), a job envied by many because of its special privileges.

Anka wasn’t assigned a job at first and then she became too ill to work. She broke out in a rash and came down with scarlet fever
that put her in quarantine for six weeks. When she finally recovered she was given a job in the department responsible for handing out milk, bread and potatoes after tearing coupons from people’s ration cards. ‘I was standing with a bucket … and giving everybody a ladleful of milk,’ she said. Her position meant that she was able to barter for an extra piece of bread or a vegetable to try to add flavour to the watery grey soup they were given every day.

It was while dishing out the milk that she first came to know the conductor Karel Ančerl, his wife and son. Ančerl was later to help organise music events in the ghetto and became the leader of the Terezín String Orchestra. ‘I happened to give him more milk than I should have – for the child … I liked them and they liked me and we became friends … If anybody had caught me I would have paid for it.’

In the coming months transports continued to arrive – at their height they brought in another thousand people every third day. Sixty thousand of the old, young, sick and hungry filled the overcrowded garrisons – an influx that placed impossible demands on the kitchens and the ancient sewage systems. The rationed water in the ghetto was contaminated and had to be boiled. Inmates were only allowed to wash their crusty clothes every six weeks. Holes were broken through the ceilings to utilise valuable loft space, damp catacombs beneath the ramparts opened up, even the stables were converted.

The latest influx were in a pitiful state and many died within days of arrival. They were poorly equipped for transportation in rickety trains and not at all prepared for what confronted them. The stink of rotting human waste pervaded everything and there was a dismal greyness about the place.

The trains that arrived between September and December 1942 disgorged the crumpled figures of Anka’s parents Stanislav and Ida, her sister Zdena and her husband Herbert Isidor, and her nephew Peter. They had been transported from Hradec Králové, the town where Anka had gone to school. Peter’s mother, Anka’s sister
Ruzena, was sent to a Czech internment camp at Svatoborice as punishment for her husband Tom becoming a ‘traitor’ by fleeing abroad. Separated from her son, who’d remained with her parents, she became very despondent, and by the time she was sent to join them in Terezín she had virtually lost interest in life.

Then Anka’s parents-in-law Louis and Selma, who were divorced, arrived separately. Louis, sixty-four, came first; then his ex-wife arrived from Westerbork, a camp in Holland established largely to accommodate Dutch Jews. Selma was accompanied by her second husband, who (much to Bernd’s embarrassment) was younger than him. The Nathans had never met their daughter-in-law before and the first words Selma spoke to Anka – referring to the private allowance she’d had from her father – were, ‘You know Bernd only married you for your money, don’t you?’ It was an inauspicious start.

By the time further relatives arrived, including the parents and brother of Anka’s cousin Olga (who was safe at first because she’d married a Gentile), the young bride found that she had no less than fifteen mouths to feed daily. Selma fully expected her new daughter-in-law to take care of her, her husband and her ex-husband, as well as a woman who cared for him. There was also an elderly aunt who depended on her completely for food and became so afraid of starvation that she would wait up for her every night in the hope of a little extra something.

‘It was jolly!’ Anka joked, even though all she could find for them to eat was an ‘inedible dark grey mess’ of boiled barley with the consistency of wallpaper paste. ‘I seemed to spend my entire life going around with my cauldron or cooking pot, desperately trying to find things to cook … for my aunt and my uncle, my mother-in-law and my father-in-law. I felt I had to support them by hook or by crook … If they’d had to live only on what they were given they would have starved.’ Many did. Her sisters were young, so they would have managed, but not her parents, especially her seventy-three-year-old father Stanislav – ‘such a gentleman’ – who never
adjusted to having to sleep on a cold stone floor with other men his age. He became so dependent on his sixty-year-old wife Ida that she couldn’t even leave him to get a job, which would have meant more food for them both. ‘In the camp [Mother] was always cheerful … my father would have died the next week if it hadn’t been for her. He clung to her all his life … but in the camp he wouldn’t let her out of his sight.’

As well as milk and a few basic vegetables and grains, the ghetto had a canteen. So young and old alike stood in line at 7 a.m., noon and 7 p.m. with aluminium plates, mugs or pots to receive a small piece of bread plus a ladleful of watery coffee or soup. Those who were assigned hard labour – the
Schwerarbeiter
– were given the largest portions, while regular workers had medium-sized rations, and the
Nichtarbeiter
or non-workers (mostly the old) were put on a starvation diet.

‘From the bottom, please?’ the hungriest would plead, hoping for something substantial. Anyone recovering from an illness was given a special ticket which allowed them a slightly larger allowance, so many feigned or prolonged their symptoms in order to get more. Whatever their status, the food they were allocated was never enough; hunger became a constant torture and the struggle to find food a daily chore. Many became listless and depressed. Destiny had forced once-proud people from beautiful homes and prosperous lives into unwanted intimacy with vermin-infested strangers. They had nothing in common but Jewish blood. Given no other choice but to breathe in air thick with the smell of unwashed bodies, fear and hunger reduced them to a bitter existence.

New jobs were handed out every day, along with ration books and basic provisions plus a few root vegetables – many of them rotten. These were supplemented at first by items including salami or canned goods that arrived in the mail from well-wishers back home. Friends and family also sent cash, which was immediately pocketed by the Germans and swapped for coupons or fake ‘ghetto money’ which could be used on the black market.

The men did most of the hard labour while the women tended to the health and welfare of young and old. Both sexes were assigned to the
Landwirtschaft
agricultural division, which was responsible for growing vegetables and keeping chickens for the Nazis, as well as sorting the potatoes, onions and root vegetables that the prisoners were allowed. A small hospital was established to deal with the many cases of pneumonia, scarlet fever, sepsis, typhus and scabies, and there were makeshift schools for the children.

Although they were permanently hungry and it was so cold in winter that they had to chip ice from the inside of the windows, Terezín’s early residents remained stoical and were secretly grateful that it wasn’t worse. Not long after they’d arrived, though, something happened that made them all realise the ‘grim truth’ of where they were and who was in charge of their destiny. ‘We were in good spirits until the executions started,’ Anka said.