Born Survivors (16 page)

But it wasn’t over yet. A typhoid epidemic in the ghetto killed more than a hundred people a day. The same wagons that delivered the mildewed bread were used to cart away the corpses. Coffins were in such short supply that the dead were wrapped in shrouds and stacked in corridors, and the crematorium had to cope with a thousand corpses a month.

Then in the autumn word came that Anka’s sisters Ruzena and Zdena, aged thirty-six and thirty-nine, her eight-year-old nephew Peter, and her brother-in-law Herbert were to be sent East as part of a transport of 5,000 souls. Her cousin’s parents would also be going, as would other family members. ‘When someone you love is going on the next transport you try to move heaven and earth to save them,’ Anka said. ‘Obviously I tried everything without any results whatsoever. I tried to … bribe the right people … but it
didn’t help. It was also a dreadful risk. There were so many people who could get hold of something to bribe somebody. The Germans said a thousand people had to go and a thousand people had to go. You were lucky or you were not.’

Scores of people killed themselves, or tried to, rather than face that journey into the unknown. There were a reported 430 suicides and 252 suicide attempts in Terezín between 1941 and 1943 – most of them during the transports. Those who couldn’t face leaving their loved ones jumped from windows, slashed their wrists, hanged themselves, or took overdoses of barbiturates stolen or bought from the infirmary.

One of Anka’s final memories of her latest relatives to be sent away was of her elderly aunt, ‘composed and coiffured’, sitting on her suitcase. ‘She shook hands with me and said, “So, see you soon,” as if we had been meeting in the Grand Hotel in Hradec Králové … not “Goodbye for ever” but “See you next week!” She didn’t know about the gas chambers but she knew it would be dreadful.’

Forcing a smile, Anka waved them off as they were marched to the spur line, the tramp of their thousand footsteps sending up clouds of dust. She prayed that she’d see them again soon and that they’d find enough to eat without her.

As the months passed and her belly swelled, Anka became excited at the prospect of being a mother, even though she had lost a lot of weight and had very few nutrients in her food. ‘We were looking forward to our baby like mad,’ she said. ‘I remember being four and a half months pregnant and the baby started moving. I was sitting in an office where I was working and I felt the movement and I ran into the main office and told my boss, “It started moving!” I was beside myself. What a miracle that was!’ But her joy soon turned to fear, especially as there was no further good news about the war and the transports East accelerated.

When the latest SS camp commandant,
Obersturmführer
Anton Burger, discovered that some of his prisoners were pregnant, he ordered them to immediately report their condition. To be Jewish
and expecting a baby was a crime against the Reich. He decreed that every foetus under seven months be aborted. He also threatened to punish those who hid their pregnancies, along with the communities from which they came.

Anka and Bernd must have chosen not to disclose her condition until it was impossible to hide it any more. Then they were summoned to the commandant’s administrative offices along with four other couples. They had no choice but to obey. There – as the angry Nazi waved a gun at them – they were each forced to sign documents agreeing to hand over their newborn babies for ‘euthanasia’. In spite of her mastery of languages, Anka had no idea what that word meant and had to ask someone afterwards. When they informed her that it meant her baby would be executed after birth, she almost passed out.

‘I never imagined that I would have to sign a paper giving [my baby] up to be killed. Nobody had ever heard anything about that before … How can you sign a thing like that? But we did. They said, “
Sie unterschreiben
!” [Sign it!] and we signed … The presence of the SS man with a revolver behind you was enough … Of course you sign!’

In November 1943, when Anka was six months pregnant, the Germans held a census to make sure that the requests for supplies matched the remaining numbers of prisoners. As a result the entire ghetto was emptied. Bernd was in the infirmary with a fever, so he was left behind, along with the rest of the sick and any infants. Anka was evacuated from the ghetto without him and accompanied instead by her parents and 36,000 other prisoners.

Fearing the worst, they were marched in the snow by armed guards to a huge open meadow in an area known as Bohušovická Basin. From 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. they were counted and recounted, half-expecting to be shot. No one was allowed to sit or relieve themselves, so they had to go to the toilet where they stood. The cold and sleet was too much for the weakest amongst them and many fell to the ground, never to recover. When they were finally
forced to run back to their barracks, Anka was enormously relieved to discover that those in the infirmary – including her husband – hadn’t been murdered.

Then in December, the summons came for her elderly parents, Stanislav and Ida, to go East. Her once-proud father, the respected entrepreneur of Třebechovice who’d built a successful leather factory and provided well for his family, had been reduced to living ‘like a pitiful beggar’ and was suffering from ill health. An SS officer had struck him across the face, breaking his only glasses so that he could no longer see. ‘That hurt me the most,’ Anka said. ‘He … became a little old Jew who hung on my mother … It was so terribly sad to see it because he … couldn’t take a step without her.’

In spite of their consuming hunger and deteriorating health, however, her parents had never once ‘burdened’ her with complaints and remained cheerful to the last. ‘When my parents went I was very upset. I said goodbye to them but I didn’t realise that it was the last time I would see them. It was very short – “Goodbye, see you again”. They knew I was pregnant and they took it in their stride. They had so many other things to consider and we thought that somehow we would all manage.’

Bernd also watched his mother Selma and other relatives depart. His blind father Louis was saved, he believed, because of his Iron Cross.

Neither Anka’s parents nor her sisters were around when her son was born a few weeks prematurely in Terezín on 2 February 1944, a few weeks after the bombing of Berlin by the Allies. The ghetto by then had a working hospital and operating theatre with modern, sterile equipment and hundreds of qualified prisoner-doctors. Anka, who had her choice of gynaecologists and paediatricians, nevertheless went through the usual agonies of childbirth that no one could save her from. ‘It hurt. I thought it was dreadful and that I would never have another child if you paid me,’ she declared, although she added, ‘Our little boy was gold!’

After the delivery, Anka cradled her longed-for child in the
Säuglingsheim
or infant home with the other mothers and babies, expecting him to be snatched from her at any minute. ‘He was a normal baby and he had plenty of food,’ she said.

She and Bernd named their son Jiri (George), which made her father-in-law very happy as he’d had a brother named George. But the Germans refused to allow any non-Jewish names, so they had to strike that out and rename him Dan – ‘not Daniel but Dan’. Still no one came to take their baby away to euthanise him, and they never knew why they had been so pardoned. They were just grateful that they had.

It was only after the war, in the hidden diaries of another prisoner at Terezín named Gonda Redlich, that the mystery may have been solved. Redlich’s wife Gerta, whom Anka knew, was another who was also pregnant. She and her husband were also forced to agree to ‘infanticide’ in November 1943. Redlich wrote poignantly in his diary that on that day ‘I signed an affidavit that I would kill my child.’

In a later entry in March 1944, after the birth of his son (also named Dan), Redlich wrote to his boy: ‘It was forbidden for Jews to be born, for women to give birth. We were forced to hide your mother’s pregnancy. Even Jews themselves asked us to slaughter you, the fruit of our womb, because the enemy threatened to levy punishment on the community for every Jewish birth in the ghetto.’ His child was saved by a ‘miracle’, he said, when the wife of a German officer gave birth prematurely to a stillborn baby. ‘Why did they cancel the order forbidding births when you and the others were born?’ he wrote. ‘Jewish doctors saved the woman. Our enemies felt for the bereaved mother and allowed your mother and other mothers to give birth.’

Anka knew none of this and focused only on caring for her infant. She had some torn-up rags for nappies and enough milk to feed him with. She shared her ‘good fortune’ with the other pregnant women who had also given birth in the ghetto, one to twins, although three of the babies later died and one of the mothers succumbed to TB.

At a month old, though, and despite having been saved from his death sentence, Dan Nathan started to weaken. Anka said, ‘He didn’t look like the other babies born at the same time.’ Within a few weeks her tiny firstborn developed pneumonia. He died on a Thursday – 10 April 1944. ‘My little boy wasn’t killed. He just wasn’t strong enough,’ she said. ‘My little boy died in my arms. It was a natural death … I didn’t expect him to die so it hit me when he did.’

Gonda Redlich wrote: ‘A child died from among those whom the Germans permitted to be born. Just think of a mother’s sorrow, who by a miracle gained a child only to lose it.’

Bernd attended a short service for his son’s cremation before his ashes were placed in a little cardboard box. It was stored with thousands of other cremated remains in the ghetto columbarium until November 1944, when most were dumped in the fast-flowing River Ohŕe.

Memorial to the ashes of the dead scattered in the river at Terezin

Anka couldn’t face the cremation. She rarely spoke of her son again. She said later, ‘It was dreadful but so many dreadful things happened afterwards that one forgets it … One gets over it somehow.’ Later she asked a cousin why she couldn’t mourn baby Dan and the cousin’s explanation made perfect sense to her. ‘We can’t afford to mourn because we will all go mad.’ She added, ‘You started thinking about what happened and why it happened, so you had to find some way not to think about it.’

One of her favourite maxims for life came from the lips of Scarlett O’Hara in
Gone with the Wind
. It was, ‘I’ll think about it tomorrow.’ Anka repeated that mantra again and again throughout her time in the camps. She admitted that what she called her ‘Scarlett O’Hara theory’ sounded ‘stupid’ and ‘irrational’ but claimed to have used it to good effect all her life. ‘If I push something off when it is happening and sleep on it then perhaps the next day it will be better. Thus far it has worked … It is a characteristic of human nature that people think they are going to survive somehow … Those who gave up and neglected themselves physically died the sooner.’

So much had happened to systematically chip away at their reality and all sense of stability in the previous few years. There was no chance of escape and no means of controlling their own destiny. ‘The way I protested was by surviving,’ she said simply.

After her son’s death, Anka suffered from a severe case of jaundice that almost killed her. She was placed in isolation in the infirmary, where Bernd was forbidden from visiting her. One day he picked a single flower from somewhere and showed it to her through the window. Much as she appreciated the romantic gesture, she said later that she was so hungry she would have far preferred a piece of bread. Eventually, though, Anka pulled through and was reunited with her husband once more.

In the months that followed, and as the Allies prepared to invade Europe, the first Danish Jews arrived in Terezín. Representatives from the Danish government and Danish Red Cross immediately
began to press the Nazis about the whereabouts of the almost five hundred Danes, and question them about the growing rumours of mass exterminations of Jews and others in Nazi camps. The Danes, of all the occupied nations, had protested most vehemently about the Nazi treatment of the Jews and managed to save the majority of their own Jews by hiding them or helping them to safety. Those they couldn’t save were monitored so closely by the Danes that the Nazis afforded them special treatment.

Anxious to quell the uproar, the Germans agreed to allow the International Red Cross, accompanied by Danish officials, to visit Terezín, but only once they had turned it into Hitler’s ‘showcase’ camp. To clean the place up some 5,000 Jews were transported East in May 1944, including all the orphans and most of the sick, especially those with tuberculosis. A further 7,500 followed. The rest of the gaunt or sickly were hidden from view and the rougher quarters kept strictly out of bounds.

The commandant planned the precise route the handful of Red Cross delegates would take and ordered a mass beautification of the buildings along the route, whose streets were reassigned pretty names such as ‘Lake Street’. Under his
Verschönerungsaktion
(embellishment action), fresh turf was laid, roses planted, and park benches brought in. Everything was painted, including meaningless signs that read ‘school’ or ‘library’. Flowers filled new window boxes, and playgrounds, a merry-go-round, bandstand, community centre and sports pitch were created. Those barracks to be visited were decorated and entire streets of gaily painted shops were opened, ‘selling’ goods seized from the prisoners’ belongings.