Approaching thunderstorm, Terezin fortress moat, Terezin, Czech Republic July 2014
Completed in 1790 by the Hapsburg Emperor Joseph II and named to honor his mother, Maria Theresa, Theresienstadt, now more commonly know as Terezin, was intended to be a fortress stronghold to ward off northern Saxon armies advancing toward Prague. Terezin was designed with a main and minor fortress and entirely surrounded by a complex system of moats. The main fortress contained a substantial town to service the needs of the military stationed there. However, Terezin never saw military action. Advancements in weaponry developed during the Napoleonic wars soon trumped Terezin’s half-century-old design. (In 1866, the advancing Prussian army simply made a wide arc around the fort on their way toward Prague.) In the late 1880s the town’s fortress status was repealed and the obsolete complex simply became a sleepy garrison town on Prague’s north flank. By the 1930’s more than half of Terezin’s 7,000 residents were civilians.
After the 1939 Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, the minor fortress became a Gestapo prison for political enemies. German authorities turned the main fortress into a Jewish ghetto in late 1941. More than 140,000 prisoners, the majority gathered from the area that is now the Czech Republic, eventually spent time at Terezin. More than 30,000 of them died there of disease, starvation and other hardships. Another 88,000 inmates were transported to the death camps in the East. At its height, the population of the ghetto approached 70,000 inmates–ten times the number of residents living inside the fortress before the war.
The photo above shows part of the east ramparts overlooking one of the main moats encircling the town. In the distance appears a classical steeple, a circa 1810 Garrison Church that dominates the town’s square. The structure to the left of the steeple is one of the last remaining tin and barbed wire barriers that partitioned the tops of the ramparts to control inmate's movements. During the Nazi occupation the moats were drained and used as gardens where inmates tended vegetables grown for the tables of their Nazi jailers. Today the town’s residents use sections of the moats for grazing livestock.
Andula Lorencova, b.1927 Photographed at her apartment, Prague, Czech Republic June 2012
Andula’s father had come to the conclusion that Europe’s future was too laden with danger for he and the family to survive on a continent coveted by the Third Reich. He had heard reports that China was a safe harbor where a Jewish family could weather the approaching Nazi storm. He decided to move his wife and two children out of harms way–out of Europe altogether. The ear, nose and throat specialist was confident that he could support the family by establishing his medical practice in Shanghai’s ghetto. Others Jews had moved there–so too would he and his family. But first he would have to depart for China, leaving the family temporarily behind in Prague while he started his clinic and worked to procure official Chinese approval for them to join him. It was a gamble he was willing to take. It was one he lost.
On December 17th, 1941, at nearly the same time the official immigration approval paperwork had reached Prague (the family contends that the paperwork had arrived days before but that the Nazis had intercepted the letter), Andula, accompanied by her brother and mother, was herded into a transport destined for Terezin. There they spent the entire war, Andula cutting mica for use by the German war machine and her brother housed in the Czech Boy’s Home and her mother working in the camp’s kitchens. Unable to return to Europe and with his entire family imprisoned at Terezin, her father practiced medicine in the Far East until the armistice. In 1945 the family was reunited in Prague.
Otto Greenfield (Grunfeld), Photographed in the Howardian Hills, North Yorkshire, England September 17, 2013
In 1942 eighteen year old Otto Greenfield (Grunfeld) was transported with his older brother Paul from Prague to Terezin.
Several weeks earlier his parents and aunt were imprisoned by the Gestapo after his father, having attempted to buy the
family out of being interned, was betrayed. The trio were jailed in Prague, moved to the notorious Little Fortress
(Kleine Festung) in Terezin, then finally murdered in Auschwitz and Mauthausen. From Terezin the pair of brothers were
also eventually sent to Auschwitz where Paul perished. Otto endured two more camps before the war's end. In August
of 1945, having been smuggled into a transport of orphaned children and youngsters up to the age of 15, the then
21 year old Greenfield arrived from Prague in a Lancaster bomber to re-start his life in England, where he eventually
settled in the rolling moor countryside of the northeast. Otto writes about his experiences durnning the war years in
the autobiography "The Survivor's Path ".
Toman Brod, b.1929, Photographed in a WWII vintage rail building located in Bubny Rail Yards from where he was transported to Terezin, Prague, Czech Republic June 2012
Between October 1941 and the of Spring 1945 more than 46,000 Czech Jews reported for transport to a cluster of dilapidated wooden barracks located three blocks from Prague’s Bubny Station. In July of 1942 thirteen-year old Toman Brod was among those herded from those barracks and into the trains for Terezin. He would find that looking back, the harsh conditions found at Terezin seemed almost an inconvenience when compared to what lay ahead for him in Poland.
In December 1944 Brod and his family were deported to the work camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau. They were billeted in a section of the Birkenau complex called “Klein Theresienstadt” (Little Theresienstadt). Like its namesake, this family camp purposely maintained an image of preferential treatment–for good reason. Although inmates were still housed by age and gender, they were otherwise allowed to move about freely and maintain social interactions in much the same manner as they had at Terezin. Prisoners here were encouraged to write letters home and could regularly receive packages and correspondences. They were not assigned the hard labor that was standard for nearly everyone else in other nearby camps. And like Terezin, the family camp had been made ready with temporary delusory stage dressings to deceive the International Red Cross inspectors into believing that Jews living in such settlements existed in peace and harmony with their German masters. However, once the International Red Cross had inspected Terezin and given it their seal of approval, then The Family Camp Terezin quickly stopped pretending.
Less than a month after IRC’s positive Terezin report, a selection process began at the family camp. Twenty-five hundred able-bodied prisoners were culled from the ranks and sent to work as slaves supporting the German war effort. The remaining camp’s residents, including all the children, were to perish in the nearby gas chambers.
At the last minute, Dr. Josef Mengele, the notorious “Angel of Death”, known for his pseudo-medical experiments on prisoners, was ordered to select around 100 boys between the ages of 11 and 15 years old to supplement the workforce. Hundreds of boys who fell within that age bracket were paraded naked in front of Mengele who capriciously picked 89 of them to join a nearby men’s work camp. Boys not making the cut were dismissed and joined their families in the gas chambers. Toman Brod was lucky that day. He made the cut and became a member of the group that would become known as the “Birkenau Boys”. Because of the deplorable working conditions only 45 of the original 89 boys survived the war.
Toman Brod is a well-respected author and historian who has produced a number of Holocaust-related books including studies on both Nazi policy and the Czech resistance
Robert Fisher, Photographed at Greenwood Cemetery, Atlanta, Georgia January 26, 2014
Fisher was an only child. He, along with his uncle and one set of grandparents, were transported to Terezin in 1943. His father had been picked up by the Nazis before their deportation and simply disappeared, leaving no trace his fate. His mother, a valued housekeeper of an SS officer, was allowed to stay in the his service for the duration of the war. Upon arrival to Terezin, Fisher's uncle, young and healthy, was made a Czech guard. The assignment came with more favorable housing conditions and an opportunity to share his space with immediate family. The uncle claimed Robert as his son. A teenage woman whom the family had just met was said to be his wife. Robert not only benefited by being able to live in better accommodations, but also from the fact that his grandmother worked in the camp's kitchen and smuggled food out in her clothing.
All the members of the makeshift family survived the Holocaust, with the notable exception of Fisher's grandfather. Assigned to street cleaning, his grandfather was used as a convenient target in the town's main square's by an SS officer showing the accuracy of his new Luger to a fellow solider. His body lay in the street till dark when Robert and his uncle retrieved the dead relative and buried him in a primitive grave near where they lived. After liberation, the remaining members of the family walk four days back to their hometown. Robert's mother had prepared the family house for their homecoming.
Oldrich Stransky, Photographed in his flat, Prague, Czech Republic September 24, 2013
In 1921 Oldrich Stransky was born into a grain merchant family who lived in the German speaking Sedeten border area of Czechoslovakia. At 20 years old, Standsky was one of 300 boys selected to work in a Nazi SS agricultural project located in Lipa. While he was there all but one member of his family were transported to Lubin, Poland. There the women and children were killed and the males put to work as slave labor. Stransky would eventually work at Terezin, then Auschwitz/Birkenau and finally at a synthetic gas factory at near Sachsenhausen. After liberation he discovered that he was the only member of his family to survive. His grandmother, the only family member to be left at Terezin after all the other family members were transported to their death, had later been murdered at Lubin, Poland as well.
In the late 1940s Stransky became a well-respected advocate for Holocaust survivors. He is credited with negotiating one of the first compensation settlements in Eastern Europe for individual Nazi victims. In 2001 Oldrich, along with four other Holocaust victims sued the IBM Corporation. The suit was filed on the grounds that the IBM corporation knowingly and in concert with it's German subsidiary, “implemented, aided, assisted or consciously participated in the commission of crimes against humanity and violations of human rights." It argued that the US-based corporation, "understood that its equipment, information and services were being used in concentration camps, where information about Jews and others was recorded, tabulated and sorted for purposes of perpetuating slave labor and ultimately extermination." The suit was eventually dropped because the prosecution lawyers feared the long proceedings would slow the payments of a special German Holocaust Fund that had been set up to compensate those who suffered Nazi persecution. Without admitting any guilt, IBM's German division paid three million dollars into that Holocaust survivor's fund.
About his tattoo Oldrich says, "I thought [at the time] if I survived, I don't have to be ashamed, and if I don't, it doesn't matter anyway". However, there was a period in the late 1950s, Oldrich admits, he was very aware of the numerals on his left forearm. It was a cautious time for Jews because the Communists occupiers, who then ruled Czechoslovakia, staged a number of anti-Semitic show trials. "At that time, I only wore long sleeves, just to be safe," he confessed.
Arek Hersh. Photographed at his home, Yorkshire, England September 15, 2013
Eleven year old Arek Hersh's first prison confinement was at the Polish concentration camp of Otoschno. From there he
would be eventually be transported to the Lodz Ghetto, followed by Auschwitz, a winter death march to Buchenwald
and finally a transport to Terezin where he was liberated during the last days of the war. However, in a cruel twist of fate,
Hersh was forced to remained in Terezin for 4 months beyond liberation because the camp had been placed in
Typhus quarantine. Once released he became one of 300 orphaned children flown to the Lake District of England to
recuperate after their ordeal. Hersh chose to remain in England and now lives in a village near Leeds. Arek has written
about his wartime ordeals in an autobiography "A Detail of History".
Nelly Rozehnalova (Kastnerova), Photographerd at home, Brno, Czech Republic July 2014
In the spring of 1943, fifteen year-old Nelly Kastnerova, along with her sister and widowed mother, was transported to Terezin, the Nazi concentration camp located 40 miles north of Prague. The Nazis had already evicted her family from their spacious home three years before. Her sister, in poor health before the transport, died two months after their arrival. While at Terezin, Nelly worked in the vegetable gardens located in the moats that surrounded the camp. At one point, her mother managed to get Nelly's name withdrawn from the boarding lists for the 1944 "Liquidation" transports to Auschwitz and certain death. At the end of the war Nelly became seriously ill while taking care of prisoners in the camp who were sick with spotted typhus. After liberation, and in better health, she moved back to her hometown of Brno and eventually she and her mother reclaimed the family home where Nelly still resides. Recently medical problems have claimed her sight.
Ivan Klima, Photographed in a woods behind his house, Prague, Czech Republic July 26, 2014
In November of 1941 Ivan’s father was sent to Terezin to prepare the town for the influx of Jewish prisoners. Ten year-old Ivan, along with his mother and young brother, followed the next month. Before deportation Klima had no idea that his family was Jewish. He was to spend the next three and a half years at Terezin. During that time he writes, “ I never saw so much as a morsel of fruit; I never ate a single egg, nor gram of butter, not to mention chocolate or rice, a bun or a piece of carrot.” In the barracks where he and his mother first lived, Ivan remembers the sight of well-off women, who just weeks before slept in comfortable beds, being forced to sleep on the floor, 35 to a room, because the space contained “not a stick of furniture”. Klima, now one of the best-known Czech authors, would later write, “Looking back at the experience, I would say I suffered less than the adults around me.”
Ivan Klima would later be persecuted by the communist regime that occupied Czechoslovakia after WWII. His autobiographical book, My Crazy Century, that covers his life during that period, has recently been released in English.
Terezin survivors Ruth & Arnost Reiser, Photographed in their apartment, Brooklyn, New York March 14, 2014
In June of 1943, seventeen year-old Ruth Freund, the only child of a Czech banker and his wife, accompanied her parents on a transport from Prague to Terezin Ghetto. The following year she was deported to Auschwitz where, one evening, she was lined up to wait overnight outside the gas chambers for extermination the following morning. A last minute German change of plans placed her on another transport. This one was to Lenzing, a sub camp of Mauthausen, where she was forced to work as a slave laborer until her liberation in 1945. Both her father and mother perished during the Holocaust.
Arnost Reiser became interested in science while he attended Czech middle school in the 1930s. He began teaching science in 1940 to Jewish children who had been prevented access to Prague's public schools by the German occupiers. Two years later he was transported to Terezin, then Auschwitz and later Friedland, a work camp that fabricated propellers for German fighters.
After liberation by the Russian Army, Reiser returned to Prague and found both his sister and girlfriend Ruth had survived as well. In Prague he earned his degree in chemistry and began teaching. He and his family fled the communist regime when the opportunity presented itself in 1960 while they were anchored off the Danish coast on an East German passenger ship. With each holding a young son, Arnost and Ruth jumped into the sea and swam toward the Danish shore where they were rescued and the eventually freed. While in Denmark, Arnost Reiser was offered a job with Kodak and worked for them as a groundbreaking industrial chemist. In 1982 the Polytechnic Institute of NYU recruited him for research and teaching. He worked there 30 years before retiring.
Eva Fisherova Stixova, Photographed at The Great Synagogue, Plzen, Czech Republic July 18, 2014
The Jewish community had had a substantial presence in Plzen, Czechoslovakia for more than three centuries. The second largest synagogue in Europe still dominates part of the city center. However, by 1930 the number of Jewish residents declined to 5% of the city’s total population. After the German invasion at the end of that decade, the census showed the number had plummeted to just 2% of the population––just slightly more than 2000 Jews lived within the city limits. Between January 17 and 26, 1942, 2605 Jews from Plzen and nearby towns were gathered at a school building for processing, marched four-abreast to the train station, then deported to Terezin in 3 transports. (These transports were among the first to arrive at Terezin during the next three and a half years.) Only 204 Plzen Jews who left on the transports for Terezin survived the war.
The oldest person transported during the Plzen deportations was ninety-years-old and died four days after arriving at Terezin. The youngest was eight-month-old Eva Fischerová. Once at Terezin, Eva was fortunate to be nurtured by a number of inmates. Many of her family members did not fare as well. Most perished in the death camps to the east. Eva Fischerová was one of only five children from the Plzen transports to survive the war. She remembers nothing from her time spent at Terezin.
After the war Eva went through school, then worked at various office and sales jobs, founded a business, married and raised two children. For 23 years she also worked on the Committee of the Jewish Community in Plzen. In 2006 she was appointed the Chairman of the Jewish Community and was instrumental in the renovation of the Great Plzen Synagogue, where my portrait of her was made.
Isidor Schindelheim, b.1924, Photographed at his apartment Arlington, Texas, U.S.A. September 2012
In 1938 Isidor’s Polish-born father was arrested at his Berlin business and forcibly deported to Poland leaving behind his German wife and two sons. After securing the proper paperwork he was allowed to return to Germany to gather his family and then return to Poland. Isidor had a different idea. He had recently joined a young Zionist group and was intent on traveling to Palestine and helping establish a Jewish state. He accompanied his parents and handicapped brother to the train station and said good-bye to them for what would prove to be the last time. They would perish in a Polish concentration camp.
Travelling to Palestine at the time was quite difficult, but he was determined to leave Germany, so Isidor looked at his travel options. He had heard that Danish families were “adopting” European Jews. He applied and was selected. Isidor immigrated to Denmark and worked with his adopted family on their farm until 1943 when Germany occupied the Scandinavian country. Although nearly 7000 Jews made it to safety across the Swedish border before the occupation, the Nazi authorities captured 500 of the recently minted Danish Jews and deported them south to the concentration camp of Terezin.
Once at Terezin, Isidor worked at various odd jobs but eventually settled into being a driver and caretaker of oxen. While at the camp he also met his future wife Marianne. The fourteen-year-old girl had already lived parentless in Terezin for 2 years. Her mother and father had been not only arrested and deported prior to her own arrest, but their ashes had been delivered to her before she was transported to Terezin.
Isidor was returned to Denmark shortly before the end of the war as part of a deal made by the Danish government with the crumbling Third Reich. Marianne had remained at Terezin and was liberated by the Russian Army. After the war Marianne immigrated to New York and lived with relatives while Isidor revisited his plans to move to Palestine. Once she located Isidor he was invited to New York for a visit and soon put aside his plans to move to the Middle East to be with her.
In 2010 he moved to Texas to be closer a daughter and his grandchildren.
Alice Sommer, b. 1904 Photographed at her flat, London, England February, 2012.
Alice Sommer was deported to Terezin with her husband and their 6-year-old son. At Terezin the 39 year-old accomplished pianist played more than 150 concerts for both the inmates and her Nazi captors during her internment. She also gave daily music lessons to the children of the camp and created a comfort zone for them within that “terrible place”. She credited her love of music with providing her hours of freedom while her world around her crumbled into death and destruction. Music she says, “gave heart to many of the prisoners, if only temporarily…. I played twice, three times a week. The audience was mostly old people–very ill people and unhappy people–but they came to our concerts and this was their food". And for her son and herself, “It was our food; and it protected us from hate and literally nourished our souls”.
Her husband Leopold was eventually separated from the family and sent first to Auschwitz and the finally to Dachau where he died of typhus six weeks before the war’s end. Alice was 110 years old when she passed away in 2014–the above portrait was taken when she was 108 years old and the oldest living Holocaust survivor of not only Terezin but of any Nazi concentration camp.
Hugo Pavel b. 1924, Photographed at his flat, Kladno, Czech Republic July 2013
On display in Hugo's flat were photographs of his family from before the war. The family had lived. Their father was a very successful salesman of vacuum cleaners. Hugo and one brother were deported to Terezin because both were older than 14 years, which was the norm for children of mixed marriages. His Jewish father would eventually follow his two sons to Terezin. Hugo's mother, a Christian, was allowed to stay home with the youngest of the three sons. That brother, Ota, became a well-known Czech author after the war and wrote a book about the story of his two brothers and his eccentric father during the war years and the trio being sent off to the concentration camp. The famous Czech film, The Death of the Beautiful Deer, is based on the book.
Carl Dubovy, Photographed at the Hamburg Barracks, Terezin, Czech Republic September 19, 2013
Doctor Dubovy looks out at the Hamburg barracks courtyard where he, along with his mother and sister, were processed after arrival at Terezin nearly seventy years ago. Originally his entire family was held in a Slovakian concentration camp. However, late in 1944 the family was separated — his father and older brother sent as slave laborers to work at munitions factories in Germany – Carl, his mother and sister were deported for extermination to the Auschwitz gas chambers. For reasons uncertain, once the transport arrived at Auschwitz it sat for eight hours on a siding with all 900 prisoners on board, and then unexpectedly rerouted to Terezin. Five months later Terezin was liberated by Soviet troops.
All the members of Dubovy's immediate family survived the war and were reunited at their Moravian hometown in May 1945. Dubovy, a resident of the US since 1947, revisits his homeland every few years. This visit was the first time he had been in the Hamburg barracks since December 1944 when he was an 11 years old prisoner.
Cell, Terezin's Lower Fortress, Terezin, Czech Republic June 2013
Misa Michael Kraus, Photographed at the New England Holocaust Memorial, Boston, Massachusetts March 7, 2014
In December of 1942 Misa Kraus and his parents were transported to Terezin. The following December they were again deported, this time to the "Family" camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, a special area was created for families transfer from Terezin and built to deceive the Red Cross. However, when it was deemed unnecessary, the camp was closed and nearly the entire camp's population was murdered in the nearby gas chambers. The only prisoners spared were ninety boys, selected by the infamous Dr. Mengele, to work as slave laborers. Kraus was one of the ninety. Less than half of the group, known as the "Birkenau Boys", survived the 10 months till liberation. Shortly after the war Kraus created an illustrated diary of his experiences as a child inmate.
This unique diary now resides in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC.
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Eva & Hana Sachselova, Photographed at Hana’s flat, Usti nad Labem, Czech Republic July 2013
Sisters Eva (left) and Hana Sachselova survived not only Terezin, but Auschwitz, a death march and the finally Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Eva credits her sister's striking beauty with saving her life. During the Auschwitz selection process that determined who would live or die, "The Angel of Death," Dr. Josef Mengele's attention was momentarily fixed on her attractive 19 year-old-sister. This allowed the 14 year-old Eva to slip between her mother and sister and into the line for adults fit to work. The second line, to which all children were directed, ended inside the Auschwitz gas chambers.
Martin Stern, Photographed on the steps of King’s Street, London, England September 16, 2013
At the age of five and a half, Martin Stern and his younger sister were transported to a concentration camp in their native Holland. Later they were deported with a large number of Dutch child prisoners to Terezin where they survived for the remainder of the war. Once liberated the children were flown in British bombers to England where most were eventually adopted. Stern became a doctor who specialized in immunology. His sister also survived captivity.
Terezin Survivor Fred Turna, Brooklyn, New York March 10, 2014
Turna has created art since childhood and made art while imprisoned at Terezin before he was deported to Auschwitz. Few pieces of his early creative work survived the war. The 90-year-old still creates daily in his third-floor Brooklyn home-studio.
Doris Grozdanovicova, b.1926, Photographed in front of the former military hospital where her mother died, Terezin Ghetto, Terezin, Czech Republic June 2012
In January 1942 Doris, her immediately family and that of her uncle’s, reported for transport to the Bruno rail station. One thousand Jews from Czechoslovakia’s second largest town were being deported north. Doris, her parents and 19-year-old brother left the transport at the only stop near Terezin. There they were forced to walk in the bitter cold, hauling with their luggage for a mile and a half until they reached the camp. Along the road Doris saw her first Holocaust victim– a corpse frozen in place where it had collapsed, a paper identification tag attached to one toe.
Doris’ uncle and his family had been unexpectedly kept on the train. No one in the family could have guessed that the next stop for that family branch would be an execution ground in Poland where they would be shot dead.
Upon arrival at Terezin, Doris’ family was immediately divided up; her brother and father to one barracks, her mother to another and Doris to the Czech Girls’ Home. Her father, who had been a bank manager before the war, was assigned a position as an official for the Jewish governing body of the ghetto. Her brother began teaching at the Boys’ Home. Doris was assigned agriculture work, first tending the gardens, and then caring for the geese and sheep in the fields beyond the moats. Doris’ mother, in poor health, remained on a straw matt in her barracks.
Her mother was the first parent to die. She slowly succumbed to the hardship of prison life and the wave of infectious disease that transferred easily in the barracks’ close quarters. An operation performed at the over crowded, ill equipped, and understaffed hospital failed to stop the infection and she died shortly thereafter.
In the same year as her mother’s death, both her brother and father were deported to Auschwitz. Although Doris’ brother managed to beat the odds and survive, her father did not.
At the end of the war Doris had no idea if any her family were alive, where she would live, or how she would survive. A Czech gendarmerie that had supervised her outside the gates offered to send her to live with his family at their home in the mountains of Bohemia. She moved in with his family and remained there for several months until she discovered that her brother was alive. They reunited in Bruno and lived together until the day Doris got married. The good-hearted gendarmerie and substitute father walked her down the aisle.
Elelina Merova, Photographed in the former "Little Berlin" near Bubny Station, Prague, Czech Republic July 2013
Elelina Merova stands in the lobby of the building from which the Germans evicted her and her family in 1940. The invading German forces confiscated quality flats occupied by Jews once they occupied Prague. The area where Elelina’s family flat and other luxury housing were located eventually became known as "Little Berlin" because the majority of the residents were German invaders. Merova survived both Terezin and Auschwitz but with no family left after the Holocaust and not yet an adult, she never returned to live in her family's pre-war flat. One of the best-known surviving pieces of art created by the children of Terezin was a pencil drawing by Elelina. It is of Snow White, a character that had become wildly popular with children at that time because of the release of the Disney feature. It is displayed in the Terezin museum.
The second floor of Dresden Barracks looking out onto the courtyard that the Nazis used to stage and film a soccer match between inmates for a propaganda movie to show the world how good the Jews were being treated at Terezin, Czech Republic June 2013
Tommy Karas, b. 1932 (originally Katz), Photographed as he looks toward his former apartment building, Bubny Rail Yards, Prague, Czech Republic June 2012.
From the vantage point of his fourth floor apartment bordering the Bubny rail yards, nine year-old Tommy Karas regularly watch hundreds of Jews being loaded into rail wagons parked on the web of tracks beneath his window. He was destined to join them two days before the Christmas of 1942. The young Karas and many of his extended family were sent to Terezin, where on arrival, they where separated and billeted according to age and gender. Because of his small size, Karas was initially allowed to stay with his mother for a time, but eventually took up residence at the Czech Boy’s Home located on the ghetto’s town square. Once with the other boys, Tommy became interested in children’s theater and sang in a number of different performances. His most notable role was playing the “schoolboy” in the children’s opera, Brundibar, created at Terezin by Jewish composer Hans Krasa before he was sent to his death at Auschwitz. Many of the child cast members from this and other performances, were also regularly transported to the Auschwitz gas chambers before they had the opportunity to perform again. Fate would allow Karas and his mother to survive the war. However, most other members of his immediate family perished in the ovens of Auschwitz.
Irena Ravelova (born Lustigova), b.1922, Photographed in the Hanover Barracks Courtyard, Terezin Ghetto, Terezin, Czech Republic April 2012.
Irena Lustigova was born and raised in Kolin, a small town an hour east of Prague by train. Before the war Kolin laid claim to having the second largest concentration of Jews (2,200) in Czechoslovakia. By 1944 not one person of Jewish decent remained in Kolin. In July of 1942 nearly one-third of the entire Jewish population in Kolin was deported to Terezin on a single train. (Out of the 730 aboard that transport, 670 had perished by the end of the war.) Irena, her sister Hanna, her parents, grand parents and Irena’s husband, Egon Fisher, were all aboard that transport.
Once at Terezin Irene was assigned to work in the ghetto’s mica factory. Her task was to separate the layers of the mineral into thin sheets that were then used for such things as insulation for German bombers. The war production job gave Irena a degree of protection from deportation. Her family did not fair as well. For a short time Irena lived with her husband, Egon, but he was soon deported to Auschwitz where he perished, as did her parents and grandmother. Her grandfather committed suicide rather than face the death camps. Irena’s sister Hanna, who had worked in the kitchens at Terezin, was also deported, but she not only survived Auschwitz, but Gross-Rosen and Bergen-Belsen from where she was liberated. The Soviet Army liberated Irena at Terezin by the Soviet Army in May of 1945.
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Zdenka Husserl, Terezin Survivor, Golders Green, London October 2013
In the fall of 1941, Paul Husserl was taken from his Prague home and deported to the Lodz ghetto in Poland. His forced departure left his wife and 2 1/2 year old daughter, Zdenka, alone to fend for themselves. Mother and daughter soon fled to her family's hometown of Zdikov where they sheltered with relatives until both were transported to Terezin a year later. Zdenka's mother was subsequently sent to Auschwitz where she would die in the gas chambers. Her father perished at Lodz. After the liberation Zdenka would be one of the youngest of 300 children flown to England where she received medical treatment as well as religious and secular instruction. Approximately half of the orphaned children brought into the country permanently settled in Great Britain. Zdenka currently lives only blocks from the Finchley Road Children's Home in London where she, along with the other 23 youngest concentration camp survivors, were housed after their initial arrival in England nearly 70 years before.
Felix Kolmer, b.1922, Photographed at his flat, Prague, Czech Republic, June 2009
In November of 1941, at the age of 19, Felix Kolmer had the dubious distinction of being sent on the first prisoner transport, Aufbaukommando, “AK I”, to Terezin. He was one of a vanguard of 342 young men between the ages of 19 and 22 who were deployed to prepare the 18th century military Terezin outpost for the more than 130,000 Jews that would eventually follow the first train. Kolmer worked as a carpenter building stacks of bunks and creating improvised barracks. Seventy-thousand-inmates would eventually populate a space that had never held more than 7,000 residents as a military town.
After the town’s initial transformation, Nazi officials became uneasy about the large concentration of young, fit Jewish men living in close quarters and the possibility that they could cause unrest among the arrivals. Most of the “AK I” group, including Kolmer, were finally deported to the notorious work camps and mines associated with the “East”. Kolmer was transported to Auschwitz in October 1944. Upon arrival Kolmer was assigned to work on street detail and dig graves with which he had recent experience. Several months before he was deported to Auschwitz, he had asked to be assigned to the evening Terezin grave digging detail, instead of his usual carpentry job. He was allowed to dig the common grave that would hold the remains of his mother who died the previous day. However, he was not allowed to attend the burial.
As the Russians advanced across Poland, the bombing near Auschwitz intensified. On one of the last nights of the war, Russian bombs destroyed the camp’s power plant cutting the power to the electric fences and extinguishing the searchlights that illuminated the fenced perimeter. Six hundred inmates surged through the wire. Kolmer was one of about 200 inmates who avoided capture and execution the following day. Once clear of the camp he began his journey home. The war would be over in a matter of hours.
Once home Kolmer reunited with his wife and moved back into their pre-war apartment in Prague. A Nazi SS officer had resided in Kolmer's flat during the occupation, but had fled before the Russian’s arrival. Kolmer still resides in the same flat today where he acts as a spokesperson for Holocaust victim’s interests and regularly serves as a guide to the Terezin ghetto.
Michaela Lauscherova Vidlakova, b.1936, Photographed at the Prague Jewish Cemetery where she was restricted to play as a child, Prague, Czech Republic July 2012
Michaela holds a toy her father made for her. She credits the small wooden toy for saving the lives of her and her family. Two days before Christmas, December 1942 she and her family reported for deportation to Terezin. It would be a surreal homecoming for Michaela’s father. Nearly three decades before, he had been born in Terezin, his father a local mill worker. Along with his wife and children, he became a prisoner in his hometown.
Since it would be another six months before Terezin inmates would complete the rail track extension from the main line to Terezin, the family walked the last the final three frozen kilometers to the Terezin town’s gates carrying what was left of their personal belongs. Six-year-old Michaela had packed a small bag packed with clothes and a single toy – a small mechanical wooden dog nicknamed “Pluto” that her father had made for her and named after the dog in the popular Disney cartoons. Jewish children were not allowed to play with non-Jewish children and thus confined by Nazi edict only to play within the confines of the Jewish cemeteries. Pluto became a companion to replace the ones she was not permitted to have.
Upon arrival at the concentration camp all deportees were interviewed and then appraised for their value to the Nazi war effort. Those with special skills, especially those that could contribute to the maintenance of the camp, were considered an asset. The old, sick, and weak were burdens not to be tolerated. Those elderly and infirmed that survived the initial depravities of the camp would eventually be shipped East for extermination. (Although Terezin was not a "Death Camp", more than 30,000 inmates died during the 3 1/2 years the camp operated.) Those young, fit and with carpentry skills were especially in demand at the camp because barracks needed to be built and maintained for the tens of thousands of inmates that would eventually he billeted within the five square block former military town. Michaela’s father told the authorities that he was a carpenter. To prove the claim, reached into Michaela's bag and retrieved the wood and string mechanical dog and proceeded to put the it through its paces for his inquisitor– making Pluto sit, nod its head, wag its tail and lay down. He was allowed to join the camp carpentry staff. He credited his piece of wooden whimsy for allowing him the opportunity to keep family together at Terezin where they all survived the war.
Frank Bright (Frantisek Brichta), b. 1928, Photographed in a bunker at a former WWII airfield near his home Ipswich, England February 2012
Frantisek Brichta ( later changed to Frank Bright) was born in Berlin to a Moravian Czech father and his German wife. He led what unanimously would pass for a happy and comfortable childhood. Scrapbook photographs taken of family leisure time suggest the family’s relative wealth. One yellowed image records his father together with two other immaculately dressed relatives promenading down a Berlin boulevard. Another fixes within it’s serrated edges more than a dozen prosperously dressed family members posing in front their tour bus at a historic spot. Appearing in many of the images is a young, smiling, and well-groomed boy looking contently into the lens. All this, of course, would change for Frank and the entire Brichta family. After the war only Frank’s image would appear on new scrapbook pages–the rest of his family had gone to ash.
In 1935 Frank started his education at a segregated Jewish school. Nazi decrees prevented Jews from attending anywhere else. For German Jews this was just a single injustice among the scores of far more serious liberties subjugated by the Nazis. Hoping to escape the escalating persecution they were experiencing in Germany, in 1939 the Brichta family left all that was once familiar, safe and secure and moved to Prague. However, in less than a year the family’s welfare was once again in jeopardy. The Munich Agreement resulted in the German occupation of western parts of Czechoslovakia and paved the way for the invasion of Poland. At the start of 1940 six million Jews resided in territories controlled by Germany. This included all of Czechoslovakia. The Brichta family was again squeezed in the vice of intolerance.
“There were many restrictions which I remember vividly”, recalls Frank Bright. “The afternoon shopping hour when nothing was left. The handing in of all radios and absence of newspapers, which left us completely uninformed. The ban on using public transportation, no clothing coupons, the curfew from 8 p.m. The wearing of the star, the disconnected telephones and the confiscation of sewing machines, bicycles, and cameras.” Even the musical instruments were taken. “Our lives were without music”, Frank lamented.
However, the loss of music and the rest of the list of banned items would soon seem trivial; like minor irritants when compared with what the future held. Whole families would soon become inconceivable addendums on the list of confiscated or already missing items.
In 1943 Frank and his family were transported to the then woefully overcrowded Terezin Ghetto. He would stay there 15 months. At first he worked in the ghetto’s vegetable garden, but eventually found a job in the camp’s locksmith workshop. His father would perform the limited duties of a Czech civilian guard within the Terezin ghetto.
In October 1944 Frank and his mother were transported to Auschwitz. His father had left just two weeks before. Once at the death camp Frank was separated from his mother and directed to the slave labor group, while his mother was sent to the gas chambers.
Three days later Frank Bright, along with 164 other standing prisoners, were transported by cattle truck to Friedland, a side camp of the notoriously brutal Gross-Rosen. There the German SS rented him out as a slave laborer to a private firm manufacturing propellers for the Luftwaffe. Seven hard months passed before war’s end. The liberating Russian forces would find Frank with the beginnings of tuberculosis in one lung, his feet damaged by frostbite, and his body horribly malnourished.
Everything he had in Prague before the war was gone. Given the opportunity, he immigrated to England where he still resides. Ironically, his house is built on the site of a WWII airfield. It was here that British fighters took off to shepherd American B17s on bomb runs to destroy the very industrial complexes in which Frank was a slave.
Disinfective Station, Terezin, Czech Republic, July 2014
Hanna Travova Zentnerova, b.1925, Photographed in the Old Ridding School where she worked as a woodworker, Terezin Ghetto, Terezin, Czech Republic July 2012
As a young woman Hanna was passionate about sports, especially physical fitness. Prague brimmed with sports clubs, but nearly all were off-limits to Jews because of the Nazi anti-Jewish decrees. One gymnasium, operated by the Jewish Council in their own building on Diouha Street, catered to Jewish athletes. Hanna began training under the tutelage of the well-respected German Jewish athlete, Fredy Hirsch. He had been recently assigned by the council to teach the Jewish youth the rewards of fitness and self-control through physical prowess. Hirsch, an ardent Zionist, had left Germany for Czechoslovakia in 1935. On December 4, 1941 a little more than a year after he begun teaching fitness, Hirsch was deported to Terezin. His young disciple Hanna Travova soon followed.
At Terezin Hirsh, with Hanna as his assistant, taught the gospel of physical conditioning to the community of captive Jewish children. The partnership lasted until Hirsch was caught violating a communication ban that prohibited him from making contact with a group of children brought to Terezin from another concentration camp. Hirsch’s punishment was a transport to Auschwitz where he continued his work with children until late 1944 where he died under questionable circumstances.
When Hirsch left Terezin he took with him much of the momentum to carry on the physical fitness program. "No one else able to match his charisma and leadership" Hanna said. Interest in organized physical prowess soon waned and the training ceased leavening Hanna with little else but her regular assigned job– helping construct wooden coffins, among other things, inside an Old Ridding School.
Hanna had no previous experience as a woodworker. Most other women her age were sent to do agricultural work in the fields outside the wall. Her work assignment at Terezin had been assigned to her completely by chance. She enjoyed being a carpenter but was especially taken by the soaring Empire style structure she worked within. The riding school arena, a remnant of the military town built 80 years before, was repurposed to serve as a woodworking shop. To her it was like “a cathedral for horses”.
Her mother worked in a far more dangerous environment. She had discovered that if she would volunteer for the typhus ward of the hospital, she would have a greater chance of keeping her family together and not being placed on a transport. For a time this proved to be true. However in 1944 Hanna’s entire family was sent to their death in Auschwitz. A capricious Fate made Hanna an orphan who was destined to live out the war making coffins in a cathedral for horses.
Pavel Stransky, b.1921, Photographed at Bulby Rail Yard from where he was deported to Terezin, Prague, Czech Republic, June 2012
Not by any stretch of the imagination would anyone ever called Pavel Stransky’s wedding night or honeymoon destination “normal”.
Pavel met his wife in the summer of 1938. He was 17 years-old, she was a year and a day younger. The attractive brunette was named Vera Stadler. He asked her to a dance while both were vacationing with their families in a small town favored by Czech Praguers for their summer holiday. As their relationship grew so too did the threat of invasion by Germany. In a fit of depression about the future, Pavel’s father committed suicide a year after the couple met. (He asked his son to accompany him in death but Pavel was too much in love to consider the offer.) Because of the death of his father, as well as his mother’s opposition to having her only child married so soon after the tragedy, the wedding plans were shelved. However, rings were bought and deposited with one of Pavel’s Arian aunts for safekeeping till the time was right. The right time turned out to be a long way off.
After graduating from secondary school in 1940, Pavel was invited by the local Jewish authority to take a course that would prepare him to teach at Prague’s only Jewish school. However, before he could take his teaching position as a Czech and Art teacher, his career as well as his wedding plans where overtaken by world events. In late 1941, less than a month before he would have begun teaching, Pavel was deported to Terezin as part of the second wave of young men sent there to prepared the town as a prison. His fiancé and her family arrived on the very next transport and his mother shortly there after. They would be among the first of more than 130,000 inmates to arrive at Terezin. More than 33,000 of those, including Vera’s father, they would perish in the camp. Another 80,000, including Pavel’s mother, would be deported East and murdered in the Nazi death camps.
Once at Terezin, Pavel and Vera found that they could maintain some limited contact. However, in December of 1943 Pavel was ordered to prepare for transport to Auschwitz. Knowing that your next of kin could voluntarily accompany you on a forced deportation, the pair decided to get married the night before the transport left for Auschwitz-Birkenau. Vera’s mother, the only other surviving relative from either of their immediate family was to join them.
Before they left they were told that they were simply being relocated. Pavel explains, “Of course, we knew neither that Auschwitz was our goal, nor that it was the largest extermination camp. Like all the others, we did not know at all about the existence of extermination camps…. So the day before [my departure] we got married; and we spent our wedding night in front of 2,500 unhappy prisoners,” he said. “And our honeymoon was to the greatest extermination camp — Birkenau.” The 2,500 prisoners were assembled in the so-called “sluice” or “floodgate” area of the camp near the rail terminus where all arriving or departing inmates passed through. Pavel spent his wedding night sitting on his suitcases with his new bride and his mother-in-law.
For two nights and a full day they rode in a crowded cattle car, eating bits of food without any water. Many of the elderly, the sick and infirmed died in transit.
“If Dante Alighieri had seen the ramp in Auschwitz–Birkenau at the end of the night of December 20, 1943, he probably would have been ashamed of his sober description of Hell” says Stransky about his arrival. Once the train reached Auschwitz those still able to walk were sorted by usefulness. Pavel and his bride were immediately separated and would not see each other or even know if the other was alive, for more than a year-and-a-half.
For a time Pavel took care of the children at the Family Camp in Birkenau, However in June of 1944 he was deported again, this time to the work camps of Schwarzheide. In a final strange twist, Stransky was “death marched” back to Terezin in the spring of 1945 and liberated at the camp where he began.
After the war Vera and Pavel were married a second time because the State did not recognize their marriage in the concentration camp. They spent their second first night of marriage at a masquerade ball.
Jacky Young (Jona Jakob Spiegel), b.1941, Photographed at his duplex, London, England, February 2012
Jacky Young has no recollection of Terezin. This is not surprising. He is perhaps the youngest person to have been deported to Terezin without being accompanied at least by one parent. His personal research shows that he was a mere 3 ½ weeks old when he arrived at the camp. Other accounts put his age at arrival at 3 ½ months old. Regardless of the slight difference in arrival times, he remembers nothing about his parents, country of origin or his stay as a newborn at Terezin.
Life begins for Jacky with a yellowed, serrated-edged photograph taken of him at 6 years old. An English Jewish couple named Yanofsky made the image after they had become his second set of parents. It would take decades before Jacky would uncover his original mother’s identity. His birth father’s name eludes him to this day.
Little Jona Jakob Spiegel was delivered to England in 1945 by a British bomber that had been pressed into service as a refugee transport. In London Jacky grew up with a new name and an awareness that he had been adopted, knowing little else about his early childhood. It was not until he was 13 years old that his adoptive grandmother revealed to him that he had been not born in England but in Austria. When confronting his parents about his past, he found them resistant to disclose much of what they knew about his beginnings. He has since spent his life searching for his origins with little to show for his effort.
The fact that Jona Jakob Spiegel father’s name does not appear in any documents, especially his birth certificate, suggests that Jona was the product of a mixed marriage. During the Nazi reign, liaisons between Jews and non-Jews could have dangerous consequences. (However, these marriages were far from uncommon before the Nazi's arrival. In the Czech Republic, nearly 40% of Jews married non-Jews during the 19430s). But after the occupation and the harsh consequences of such unions, was not uncommon for a non-Jewish parent’s name to be omitted from birth records. Jacky became resigned to the notion that he will never know who his father was or, if he has any surviving relations on that side of his stunted family tree.
However in 1982, through luck and perseverance, Jacky uncovered his mother’s tragically short history. Her name was Elisa Spiegel. She had worked as a hat maker in Vienna. Jona, her only child, was born in that same city. He learned that her parents were from a rural town in Czechoslovakia and had moved to Austria during the 1920’s. He also discovered that after his mother had surrendered him to unknown authorities, she was deported from Vienna to Maly Trostenet, a concentration camp near the Russian town of Minsk. There she was executed and buried in a mass grave that would eventually contain the remains of more than 200,000 victims of the Holocaust.
Young was also astounded to discover that the infant Jona was put on another transport. This one headed to the Terezin concentration camp ghetto where he became a diapered inmate. More research followed but yielded little. When the trail grew cold he wrote a short story about his frustrating search for his beginnings. It was titled “Waiting To Be Found”. Jacky Young is still waiting.
Helga Weissová-Hošková, b.1929, Photographed at the Liben Synagogue where she received religious training as a child, Prague, Czech Republic June 2012
Helga Weissova is perhaps the most well known of all the living child chroniclers of Terezin. This, of course, was never a large group and now, with the passage of more than six decades, their number can be counted on two hands. Reliable sources estimate that as few as one child in 10 of the 15,000 total deported to Terezin survived the war.
Helga and her parents were transported to Terezin in January 1942. Hidden in her parent's luggage, among their allowable personal belongings, were their daughter’s paints, brushes and notebooks. Starting with these basics, then supplementing them with purloined art supplies from the inmate staffed Nazi propaganda art studio, Helga was able to produce more than 100 scenes of life and death during her nearly 3 years of imprisonment at Terezin.
However, her first painting was of an imaginary snowman. After seeing it, her father encouraged her “paint whatever you see”. She took his advice to heart and began to paint vignettes of daily life, institutionalized cruelties, crippling starvation and the scenes of darkness that surrounded her during her days as a captive. Some of her paintings depicted moments of relative normalcy like that of a string quartet giving a concert in a barracks dorm. But much of her art was dominated by depravity and the fight for survival– people scavenging through trash cans for food, women boiling infection-laced sheets, bread being delivered from a hearse pressed into service as bakery wagon, or inmates checking for lice.
One of her last paintings before war’s end was a scene depicting people waiting in line for a truck to transport them to the gas chambers. It was the very same scene her 46-year-old father would eventually join. Helga and her mother were sent to Auschwitz in the fall of 1944. It was there on the arrival platform that she deceived one of the most reviled of Nazis, Dr. Josef Mengle, convincing him that she was older than she actually appeared and that she was able to take on adult work. Helga relived the last seconds of the encounter in her journal. "It'll soon be our turn… the rows are quickly disappearing, the five people ahead of us are on their way… just two more people, then it's us. For God's sake, what if I'm asked what year I was born? Quick, 1929, and I'm 15, so if I'm 18… '28, '27, '26. Mum is standing in front of the SS man – he sends her to the right. Oh God, let us stay together! 'Rechts', the SS man yells at me, and points the direction. Hooray, we're on the same side."
She and her mother were waved to the forced labor queue rather than the one filled with mothers and children heading to the gas chambers.
From Auschwitz Helga was deported to the work camp of Flossenburg and then cheated death a second time when she survived a 16-day death march to the camp at Mauthausen where she endured till the end of the war.
"My father told me that, whatever happens, we must remain human, so that we do not die like cattle," Weiss recalled.
At the end of the war Helga returned to Prague where she married and continued her life of art. She still paints and exhibits in Europe and America. The apartment she now occupies is the same one, with the notable exception of the 4 years it was occupied by a German family during the war, that she has lived in her entire life.
"I was born in this apartment," says Mrs. Weissová-Hošková. "It is not much, there are better places to live, but I belong here, my roots are here."
Solomon Stopnicki and his sister Lusia Joskowitz, Photographed in Lusia’s Joskowitz's backyard, Houston, Texas February 22, 2013
The Stopnicki siblings endured several camps during the Holocaust. But as the Russian push the eastern front lines back closer to the Germany homeland, the Third Reich emptied out their concentration camps of inmates before they advancing Russian reached the compounds. They goal was to leave as little incriminating evidence behind that they would have to answer to if they were defeated. Full transports that once head east to the death camps, now went in the opposite direction. The last transport the Stopnicki would board ended at the horribly overcrowd and typhus ridden Terezin. Several weeks later the advancing Russians liberated them in April 1945.
The basement of the Czech Girl’s School where the children practiced their theatrical performances, Terezin, Czech Republic June 2013
Anne Hyndrakova (Anne Kovanicova), b. 1928, Photographed at the Bubny rail yards from where 44,000 prisioners departed to Terezin, Prague, Czech Republic, June 2012
Until the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Anne Kovanicova led the life of a normal Czech child. Her existence changed dramatically with the arrival of the Nazis. Soon Jewish children were not allowed to play with non-Jews; their play was confined to Jewish cemeteries. By 1941 all were forced to wear the yellow star and were bullied in public. Soon most items once taken for granted were confiscated, including family pets. The assassination of Reichsprocter Heydrich accelerated the hardships.
In September 1942 Anne’s family was summoned to board a deportation train to Terezin, but, for unknown reasons, the train departed leaving them on the platform. The family spent nearly six weeks waiting at the deportee’s barracks where the average stay was 3 days.
“Because of all the inequality and lack of freedom [in Prague], I was actually quite looking forward to going to Terezin, for I saw it as a kind of scout outing. Once in Terezin we were kind of relieved that we were among our own kind and that everyone wore the star. We were equal among equals.”
Her first job in Terezin was in the box-making workshop. She was later assigned to work as a dentist's assistants and then as a agricultural worker. Her father worked at the disinfesting station and her mother was assigned duties in a warming kitchen. Initially Kovanicova lived with her mother but was later was transferred to live with girls her own age at the Czech Girls Home. “Life in the youth house was the best of what you could have in Terezin” Anne would later say.
During the 18 months the family lived at Terezin, Fate intervened twice to abort their transport to Auschwitz. But the third time Fate was elsewhere and the trio was placed onboard a cattle truck with fifty other prisoners and driven to Auschwitz. Upon arrival, Anne and her parents were billeted next for the camp’s gas chambers and the crematory’s chimneys. A month later the family was separated–Anne assigned to a Birkenau work camp, her parents to the ovens next door.
From this point, Kovanicova survived a number of work camps at Gross Rosen. She first cut down trees, clearing space for roadways, and then she worked in a munitions factory and finally loaded sand onto trucks. As the Russians neared the camp, prisoners where hastily forced on a death march back toward Germany. During the march Anne escaped into the woods but was recaptured three days later and taken to two more labor camps.
During the last days of the war, she was again on the move. The German work camp commander offered to take a group of his prisoners with him to the American lines where he intended to surrender before the Russians captured him. After being abandoned by the commander, lost in the German countryside and experiencing a number of near fatal encounters with the advancing Allied Forces, Kovanicova was eventually given safe passage by the Russians and returned to Prague.
There she discovered that not only were her parents dead, but her sister and newborn niece had been gassed, her brother-in-law died on a death march and most of her other relatives were missing.
Today on a wall in Anne Hyndrakova’s home, empty frames hanging among family photos taken in happier times represent lost family members.
Irena Marvanova (born Eislerova), the last Jewish women in Kolin, b.1929, Photograph in the Kolin's former Jewish Quarter, Kolin, Czech Republic July 2012
Irena Marvanova is one of the last two Jews living in the town of Kolin. At the beginning of the 1940’s Kolin had the second largest Jewish population in Czechoslovakia. In June of 1943 Irena and her family where deported to Terezin along with the last one-third of the town’s remaining Jewish population.
By the end of the war there was not a single Jew who inhabited the town. Although 69 former Jewish residents returned to Kolin after the war, the vast majority (2,068) of the 2202 members of the original Jewish community had been murdered. Of the 734 deportees on Irena Eislerova’s transport, only 64 survived. Beating the odds, all four of the Eislerova family members were among those survivors.
Because the Jewish population had been decimated, it was impossible to reestablish life in Kolin as it had existed before the war. In 1953 the official and ancient Jewish Community of Kolin ceased to exist. The Jewish synagogue is now a museum with few visitors; the Jewish quarter is a fashionable part of the city center with no Jews.
Hanus Hron, Photographed at the Sudeten Barrack in Terezin as he returns after 70 years to where he was first held captive, Terezin, Czech Republic July 2013
Hanus Hron was deported to Terezin on one of the early transports which was filled with young Jewish men sent to the former military town to make the it ready for the thousands of inmates that were to follow.
Heron and the rest of the workers were billeted in the three-storied, horseshoe shaped concrete structure renamed by the Germans, the Sudeten barracks. (Predominantly German speaking residents populated the boarder areas of the Czechoslovakia. The was called the Sudetenland, and it's residents identified more with their Nazi neighbors than with their Czechoslovakia countrymen. The ostensible mistreatment Sudetenland residents became one of the reasons given by Hitler for the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Renaming one of the first barracks that housed Czech Jews “Sudeten” was probably a not-so-subtle reminder to the Czech of their past alleged behavior and the consequences of the mistreatment of Germans.)
Hron slept the concrete floor of in one of the large empty rooms with 300 other prisoners. A tinkerer with mechanical things since childhood, Hron was employed in Terezin's locksmith workshop. Once the remolding and building in the town was complete, nearly all of the hundreds of young men who had done the work were deported to other work site. In 1944 Hron volunteered to join a group of labors that were being sent to Wulkow, where a facility 30 kilometers from Berlin that was being built for the Reich Security Head Office. In the spring of 1945 he was returned to Terezin just months before the Russians liberated it. There he was reunited with mother and his younger sister who had also been deported to Terezin just a week after he had initially in the winter of 1941.
Zdenka Erlick (Fantlova) b.1921 Photographed at her apartment located on the same floor of the building where the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich was planned by British and Czech military forces, London, England February 2012
Zdenka Fantlova was eighteen when the Nazis evicted her from her high school. “But because I was young and I didn't want to sit at home and darn my socks, as my mother wanted to, I entered the English Institute here in Prague for a year, at the British Council, simply because I had heard Fred Astaire singing a song from an American musical, a Broadway melody, 'You are My Lucky Star'. And I was so fascinated that I thought I'd have to learn this language. I was learning the song word by word and had no idea what I was singing.” She credits this early interest in English with later saving her life.
By all accounts Zdenka led an idyllic childhood in pre-war Czechoslovakia. That would change on Wednesday the 15th of March 1939, when her father called the family to their second floor dining room window to watch the German Army march into their town, claiming it for the Third Reich. Soon came the race laws, wearing of the Yellow Star, arrests, transports and concentration camps. But before all that, came Arno.
Arnost Livits’ family had recently moved inland from the Sudeten borderlands to escape the German annexation. Zdenka and Arno, as she called him, soon became friends and then lovers. “The German occupation vanished from our horizon,” she wistfully recalls. However, “Gradually we accepted the fact that there was no escape from the Germans and their plans for us…. Our prayers, Arno’s and mine, were simply that we should not be sent on separate transports. As long as we stayed together, nothing bad could happen to us.”
That prayer was not answered. It would be the first of several that would remain unfulfilled. Zdenka’s father was the first to go. He had been reported by a neighbor for listening to the BBC broadcasts and was seized by the Gestapo during family dinner. He was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. The rest of his family was soon transported to Terezin. Once there, Zdenka was reunited with Arno. Throughout the following winter they saw each other frequently, he as a potatoes hauler and she as a potatoes peeler. (At least on one occasion they met in the more private confines of the kitchen’s cellar.)
In June of 1942 General Reinhart Heydrich was assassinated in Prague. In reprisal, Hitler ordered 2,000 Jews to their deaths. Prisoners on the “punishment” transport had no knowledge they were marked for death. Arno was select for that transport. The night before he left he slipped a tin engagement ring that he had crafted from scraps, onto Zdenka’s finger with the promise, “If we’re both alive when the war ends, I’ll find you”.
After Arno’s departure Zdenka continued to work kitchen duty. In the evenings she began to participate in the Magdeburg barracks’ attic theater. The Germans gave their blessing to these Kamaradenabende, “friendly evenings”. This theater became the kindling for Zdenka’s lifelong passion for the stage. Looking back she emphatically states that “Terezin was heaven compared to what came after’’. In 1944 she was left Terezin on what would become a torturous circuit of death, ricocheting from one death camp to another–Auschwitz, to Kurzbach, to Gross Rosen and finally to Belsen.
During the last days of the war she remembers that “I was one of three hundred on the floor, some were alive, some were dead; you couldn't tell the difference anymore between who was breathing, who was not. I was just like a dying animal lying there on the floor - completely left to my own devices. My lips were blue from thirst. I was delirious. I was as close to death as one can possibly be... I only
had eyes and teeth. The rest was gone."
She credits her knowledge of English for her ultimate survival. A British solider heard her plea to remain at the Red Cross post overnight and positioned her so she was assured to be transported to the hospital the next morning. Near death and weighing only 77 pounds, she was transferred to a rehabilitation center in Sweden. Later she learned that Arno, her mother and sister had been gassed at Auschwitz, her brother shot while trying to escape and her father had died two weeks after his liberation from Auschwitz.
Zdenka Fantlova later went on to become a well-known European actress living first in Austria and now in London. Ironically, she has lived the past 40 years in an apartment overlooking Hyde Park which is located in the same building, and on the same floor, on which the British military and Czech resistance planned the Prague assassination of Rinehart Heydrich – the event that lead to death of her fiancée Arno.
Sol Wachsberg, Photographed in his Post Oak Condo, Houston, Texas USA February 22, 2013
Sol Wachsberg has the dubious distinction of being held captive 4 1/2 years in eleven different camps including Auschwitz, Faulbruck, Gross Rosen and Terezin. His brother Charles can claim a variation of the same, although Charles was never at Terezin. A German military patrol pick up the brothers as they shoved snow outside their home located in a small Polish town near the Auschwitz. The brothers were initially in the same concentration camp, the nearby Auschwitz death camp. They still wear sequentially numbered tattoos on their arms that they received there. (Auschwitz was the only camped that tattooed their inmates.) Sol and Charles were soon were separated, each working as a slave laborer in a number of different camps. They would not see each other until war’s end. They now live in the same Houston condo building, Sol on one floor and his brother Charles, one-floor directly above.