Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team |
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Survivor Stories
Chelmno Survivors Michal Podchlebnik Szymon Srebrnik
"Righteous Gentiles"
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The Family Brichta Part Two – Prague and Deportation to Theresienstadt
Prague
My mother’s and my arrival in Prague
The next few days and weeks were confusing, so many events, so many bad news in quick succession, no fixed abode, the past certainties such as home, school, town, friends, relatives, everything I knew abruptly broken. We had turned into refugees, like so many there, in a strange country with a strange language. Czech is Slavonic and has no connection whatever with German or with any Romance language.
From the State Central Archives in Prague I now have a copy of our police register, (App. ) In Austria and Czechoslovakia, which had been part of the Austrian Empire until October 1918, every move by a citizen had to be registered with the police and such documents are now useful. The first part of the form contains every possible detail, including the names of the father’s parents and grandparents, our names, my mother’s maiden name, when and where we were born, religion, marital state, profession, domicile, day, month and year of marriage.
No identity card could be that comprehensive. The second part contains the changes of address, the day, month, year of the move from, the place moved to, the name of the street, the number, the landlord and the date of leaving the premises. They certainly kept their tabs on one and that was certainly a liberal democracy, not a totalitarian state.
The Library
On arrival in Prague my mother and I stayed at a cheap hotel, called a pension (pronounced the French way) run by nuns. Accordingly it was Spartan to say the least. Until my father joined us and found something permanent, although permanent is perhaps the wrong word in those uncertain times, that’s where we stayed. It was not far from Prague’s main thoroughfare, the St. Wenceslaus Square (Václavské náměsti) with the equestrian statue of good King Wenceslaus (Václav I, r.900-929, who was murdered in the St.Vitus cathedral in circumstances similar to the murder of Thomas á Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, in Canterbury Cathedral, in 1170 in the reign of Henry II, both became national saints and places of pilgrimage).
St Wenceslaus Square is a sloping very wide street and is short in proportion to its width. Tramlines run along its centre. At the top end is the National Museum. At the bottom was, and may be is again, the Street of the 28 October, commemorating the day the Republic was declared in 1918. The Germans did not surrender on the Western Front until November 11th. The Austrian Empire had collapsed two weeks before the German one.
Also at the top end was a small lending library with German books. It became a second home, I read something like a book a day. Karl Mai's Wild West stories about Red Indians and Cowboys, all written in Germany, and translations into German of Zane Grey’s novels, also of that genre, but also popular science, like “Die Mikrobenjäger” (the Microbe Hunters) by Paul de Kruif, about the pioneers in micro-biology, like Koch and Pasteur, who taught themselves to dye microbes to be able to study them under the microscope, who created antibodies and discovered the ways of inoculation against diseases like diptheria, typhus, smallpox, cholera, anthrax in sheep and humans which had killed millions until they had come along.
Others found the causes and the cycle in the blood stream and the transmitter of malaria, the anopheles mosquito, all taking years of patience and trials on animals and risks to themselves in a new field. Also inspiring was the quest to find a cure for syphilis where the winners were Paul Ehrlich and the Japanese Hata who won the Nobel Prize jointly in 1906 for Salvarsan manufactured by the German pharmaceutical company Bayer, also known as Product 606 because it was the 606th attempt at an arsenic based substance which was successful.
Paul Ehrlich was Jewish but the Germans claimed him as their own and, at the time, he thought of himself as being German. My mother claimed that she was related to the Ehrlichs. The book impressed me so much that I remember most details and, on the strength of it, I decided to become a micro-biologist. However fate got in the way and decreed otherwise.
This existence in no-men’s-land, shared with other refugees worse off than the two of us, lasted for six months. From the police register I know that we didn’t move into our small flat until 29 November 1938 and we were going to live there for the next 4½ years.
My Father’s Whereabouts
So where was my father meantime? I now have a personal note and a formal reference from Dr.Walter Pincus, the owner of the Jewish bank where my father had been company secretary, etc for 15 years, dated 1 August 1938, i.e. his job did not officially come to an end until then, by which time we were out of harm’s way in Prague.
By “out of harm’s way” I mean Kristallnacht when synagogues were burned to the ground, hundreds of people were arrested and sent to concentration camps and a fine of a milliard Deutschmarks imposed on the Jewish population (never repaid after the war) and the insurance money pocketed by the state, which took place on 9 November 1938, a date which seems to hold a fascination for terrorists and others of that ilk.
I know that my father travelled to and from Berlin to continue with periodontic treatment by his Berlin dentist. His years in Russian captivity lead to paradentose, or receding gums, caused by lack of vitamin C, the same illness suffered by sailors on long voyages, until it was discovered that limes, similar to lemons, prevented it. His dental treatment consisted of every tooth being drilled at a slightly different angle, tight-fitting pins being passed through and the pins connected to a metal band behind the teeth.
All that naturally took time but then, as a foreigner, he was free to travel but it left us two in a limbo. He also joined up. During the Sudeten and Munich crises the Czechs had a short mobilisation. On May 20, 1938 Czechoslovak reservists were recalled, but it could have been from 23 to 30 September 1938 if one looks at the rapidly unfolding events.
The Munich Crisis
The Munich Crisis, as it became known, came about at the end of September 1938 on Hitler’s terms and was concerned with Germany’s designs on Czechoslovakia, with France, her ally, showing no interest in protecting her. In fact the Czechoslovak government was excluded from the talks concerning the very fate “of a faraway country about which we know nothing” and her defences within the Sudetenland were not on Mr. Neville Chamberlain’s agenda either. The Czechs felt to have been, and were, abandoned and, as an act of defiance and a gesture that they would fight alone, mobilised.
By 30 September 1938 Chamberlain had accepted Hitler’s ultimatum, the very same which he had rejected on 23 September. He then gave an Allied guarantee of a rump Czechoslovakian state which was as useless as the piece of paper he waved on arrival back in London and his words “Peace in our time” which he must have come to regret.
I know that my father enjoyed his short spell at soldiering but at a most bewildering time for all refugees in Prague, and that was where thousands of them were, whose fate hung in the balance on the outcome of these talks and with every news being bad news we could have done with him.
My Father’s Arrival in Prague
Even after he had been demobilised he was out and about and that, as it turned out, was fortunate. May be not as fortunate as trying to emigrate, something I don’t think my parents contemplated at that time, but fortunate if we were going to stay. He liked people and in a way he was unique in the circumstances then prevailing. He was, as it were, an honorary Berliner who knew of their plight, but he was also a native who spoke Czech.
Certainly once he had arranged to rent one of the many small apartments in the district of Líbeň, a developments of six storey blocks of flats at na kopečku (on the hillock), and what remained of our furniture had arrived from storage and we had moved in on, as already mentioned, 29 November 1938, he made use of his contacts and volunteered to work for nothing for the Jewish community.
This community organisation barely existed, there had been very little need for it. There were some poor people who needed assistance, there was a school with hardly any pupils as I found out, and possibly an orphanage and an old people’s home. Contributions, or a tax on the better off, introduced by the Austrians, made this arrangement tick over with the minimum of employees. They were thus completely unprepared for the influx of refugees, first from Germany, then the flood from Austria and then the deluge from the Sudeten.
For a short period their task was humanitarian aid, accommodation, food, pocket money and organising training in various trades for those hoping to be able to emigrate and needing, or perceiving to be needing, handicraft rather than professional skills. It was a somewhat hopeless task. The refugees had besieged, and to no avail, foreign embassies and consulates in the towns where they had come from. They continued with the same zeal bordering on desperation, this daily routine in Prague and with the same result, and now they had to compete for the fixed number of available visas with the local Czech Jews.
The Community, later known as the Ältestenrat (Council of Elders)
The community, such as it was towards the end of 1938, welcomed my father with open arms. He spoke both languages fluently, was a very good administrator and cost no money. Immediately following the occupation on 15 March 1939 all the anti-Jewish laws which had been promulgated in Germany since 1933, such as the dismissal of Jewish public employees, school teachers, university professors and lecturers, army personnel, the expropriation of Jewish shops and enterprises, the prohibition of Jewish doctors and dentists to attend non-Jewish patients and a drastic reduction in the number permitted to practice at all, the declaration of accounts, of property, the handing in of gold, silver and valuables, of cars, musical instruments, bicycles, sewing machines, cameras, skiing outfits, surgery equipment, etc. required more community employees to implement these laws, rules and restrictions.
When deportations started in October 1941 from Prague to Lodž in Poland and from Brno in Moravia to Minsk in Russia and then, from November 1941, when Jews from all over the Protektorat were sent first to the ghetto of Theresienstadt before being sent on to the East from there, to the end of July 1943, when Bohemia and Moravia had been made Judenrein, cleansed of Jews, the number of employees had grown very large.
Many had to deal with the 16-page property declaration every deportee had to fill in before handing in his or her keys of flat or house at the point of departure which then formed the basis of well organised looting, storing, sorting, valuing, separation and dividing into groups, i.e. books, kitchen utensils, carpets, furniture, clothing, pictures, etc. The Germans were very keen to know beforehand what was to fall into their grubby hands. Once all Jews had been deported the jobs of the employees had come to an end and they themselves were sent to the ghetto and onwards from there.
However, and obviously, the longer one was able to stay behind and out of the transit ghetto, the greater the chances of survival since, as soon as one arrived in the ghetto, one became eligible for such onward transport, see the fate of my two good friends Kurt Herschmann and Kurt Diamant.
Thus, as my father was head of the section dealing with these property declarations (Vermőgenserklärungen), our deportation was postponed until 13 July 1943. This late departure gave us the chance, too small as it turned out for my parents, to survive.
The summer of 1938
What I remember of the summer of 1938 in Prague is that it was very hot with refugees milling about the centre of town and that we tried to creep into the shade. Prague is in a hollow and traps heat. It is also humid, a wide river, the Vltava, or Moldau, flowing through it and its medieval builders knew very well how to deal with that, they built arched and vaulted walkways in front of shops and around squares.
I cannot remember when exactly I started to attend school but it was probably shortly after we had moved into our flat in Líbeň at the end of November 1938 by which time snow and ice covered the streets. To learn Czech was of the utmost importance and my father found a Jewish high school student who came to our flat once a week to teach me.
As this young man spoke no German whatsoever conversation proved fraught at first but the Czech book of grammar with its rules and exceptions, genders and cases, seven of the latter, and a dictionary, soon got me going and before long I was fluent with a large vocabulary.
After all, I had nothing else to do and one was surrounded by the sound which helped. At my age, I had just turned ten, one absorbs quickly and tram drivers mistook me for a native. My mother never learned Czech, had no need for it and because, with the exception of a handful of occasions when we visited relatives from my father’s side, who disappeared early on, she never left the flat throughout the 4½ years we lived there, not much of an existence.
With restrictions implemented soon afterwards there was nowhere to go anyway. Any shopping to the greengrocer at the corner of the street had to be done by me in Czech. In any case I was less conspicuous when it was done out of the restricted Jewish shopping hour, and I ventured to the pub at the corner opposite the greengrocer, using the rear entrance and through the kitchen to get a jug of beer, again, because I was 12 to 14, in short trousers and didn’t attract attention to my illegal activity.
My School in Prague before the German Invasion
My father had enrolled me at the Jewish school. It was nominally a religious (náboženská) school and it was located in the Old Town on the Jáchymova street. In Berlin my school had been on the Joachimstaler Strasse. Jáchymov is the Czech for Joachimstal, which is a coincidence.
It is there that radioactive pitchblende is found from which Madame Curie extracted gamma rays, but that is by the way. When I started there the differences between it and my Berlin primary school were most noticeable. The Prague school had no assembly hall, no gym, no laboratory, not a single scientific instrument, Bunsen burner or microscope, no school yard, and the Berlin one had been small enough.
It had long old-fashioned benches and no pupils. I could have been enrolled at any of the Czech schools but at that time could not yet speak Czech. There were also German schools, there was a German Charles University in Prague, but teachers and pupils there were ardent Nazis. To the charge that the Jewish school didn’t offer a liberal education the answer is that it had never been the intention of its founders, rightly or wrongly, to provide that. On the other hand it didn’t provide a religious education either.
I was very keen to continue learning Hebrew and to build on what I had been taught in Berlin and to read the prophets and psalms in the original, as I did later, to a small extent, for my barmitzvah, but we weren’t taught that either. I attended the school from the end of 1938 to June 1942, when the school was closed, and I can honestly say that I have no secondary education.
Subjects like physics, chemistry, mathematics, pure and applied, biology, history, economics, ancient or modern language all remained a closed secret except for the popular science books which I bought with my pocket money and read by myself. More about that later.
Na kopečku, č.p.1915, our block of flats
Let me explain right from the start that č.p. means číslo popisné or description or registration number. Houses there have two numbers, the street number and the land registry number. As it wasn’t really a street yet it had only the land registry number.
This block of small flats, or apartments, my father had found for us and into which we moved on 29 November 1938 (see p. ) had only just been completed. It had been designed and built and was made ready by a Czech architect, they were more versatile that their British counterparts.
I remember being taken to his office and admiring his drawing instruments displayed in a large glass case. The development, as it would now be called, was on a large scale, there were three adjoining identical blocks six storeys high, the upper two had balconies. I know about only one of them, the outer block in which we lived on the fifth floor.
A reinforced concrete framed structure it was clad in matt, light-coloured tiles which kept it clean to this day. Along the ground floor the outside of the building is now disfigured by graffiti, at least we didn’t have them in those days over 60 years ago. It had a basement where each tenant had a compartment or storage space which in reality was only a wire-mesh fence stapled to a wooden frame and, because it was so open things got stolen. E.g. we had a bronze chandelier from Berlin which we couldn’t accommodate upstairs, one day it had gone.
But since everything was to go or had already gone that didn’t matter any more. The basement also housed the central heating boilers and coal store and the porter’s flat. There was a telephone in the entrance lobby just behind the entrance door and that was very handy indeed as Jews were not allowed to have phones except for a few doctors, only those who were permitted to practice, though only have Jewish patients.
That facility was to save my life. There was a lift, though I preferred to run up and down the stairs taking two steps at a time.
Na kopečku, - Its Jewish tenants
Because the block had been completed at the time of the Munich crisis it is not surprising that a few families from the Sudeten had landed there as the Munich crisis developed, the local Nazis became more confident and threatening and the prospect that Jews would share the fate of their German and Austrian brethren more certain.
The Fantls lived on the sixth floor, the floor above above us. There was Dr.Leo Fantl and his wife, Dr.Helene Fantl, both philologists, and their two children, Brigitte and Friedrich, or Bedřich in Czech. What I knew of Dr.Leo at the time was that he had a great interest in graphology which he shared with Dr.Gottfried (Friedl) Bloch on the ground floor, and that he was also a cantor (chazan).
On one of the High Days, on Yom Kippur, the day of Atonement, in 1940 and 1941 my father asked me to go to the synagogue where Dr.Fantl officiated single-handedly all day to make up numbers, the community had already shrunk considerably under the impact of deportations and were also afraid to attend.
As I could read Hebrew I could follow the service, his voice was very clear. He too worked for the Jewish Community and from the list of its employees in 1942, now in my possession, I now know that he was a “Matrikenfűhrer”, which I translate as the manager of the index-card department. According to Dr.Gottfried Bloch’s book “Unfree Associations” Dr.Leo Fantl had been a well known music critic for a Dresden newspaper.
This was confirmed by Mrs. Helen Gregory who searched the internet for me. However I always spoke to members of the family in Czech and had then no idea that they had lived or that their children had been born in Germany.
All I knew is that they had fled to Prague from Teplitz/ Teplice in the Sudeten. Therefore my guess is that they had originated in Teplitz in the Czechoslovak Republic and had, just like my father, found work in Germany after the Great War, had returned to the Republic and their home town after the Nazi takeover when he would have lost his post around 1933/35 and that the children had learned Czech in Teplitz at an early age. A few years ago I found that Dr. Leo Fantl had been born in Prague.
On the fifth floor, next door to us on one side lived a single Czech man and on the other side lived a Jewish mother and daughter. We believed that the Czech man kept listening to the BBC’s broadcast in Czech from London, an offence punishable by death, and my father tried to listen in by means of a listening device consisting of a saucepan with the open end pressed against the wall acting as an amplifier, but to no avail.
Our neighbour had the radio on so softly that only he could just about hear it. With Jews being forbidden to buy or read newspaper we were all desperate for reliable news of the progress of the war, our only hope. What Jews passed on as news among themselves, called bonkes, many may have been reliable at the start but, after having been passed around, were embellished in the process and were either too good to be true or so bad that one didn’t want to believe them.
The Jewish mother and daughter had also fled from the Sudeten. The husband/father had been an officer in the Czechoslovak army and had died. Life expectancy was much lower then than it is now. As was the custom among officers, one of them would look after the widow and her children and one of them did, he was not Jewish. When the two were due to be deported on one of the first transports to the ghetto of Lodž/Litzmannstadt towards the end of October 1941, he volunteered to go with them and, although not Jewish himself, was permitted to do so.
It was most gallant and chivalrous but he could have done nothing for them there. Of the 5,000 men, women, children and old people sent to that ghetto 276 survived. One of them was my friend and fellow prisoner in Friedland, Paul Briess/Brennan but than he had a marketable skill, he had learned electric arc welding and German industry needed that, or at least until that ghetto was liquidated by the inhabitants being sent to Auschwitz.
On the floor below us lived two families from Teplitz, a teacher and his German-Aryan wife, i.e. a mixed marriage which protected the Jewish husband from deportation. Although he had only been a high school teacher he was called professor, now with time on his hands. I was attending school for half a day only and I had no homework so I too had time on my hands.
He asked me whether he could teach me algebra and German shorthand. I never took to German shorthand but I lapped up algebra, a facility which five years later came useful when I started to attend London’s Regent Street Polytechnic’s evening classes in mechanical engineering from September 1946 onwards.
The other family on the floor below us consisted of a mother with her two adult sons. She was getting on. Mother was elderly, the older of the two men, they were hardly boys, had been a prisoner of war in Siberia, just like my father had been.
He had remained single. The younger one was sent by the Germans to Theresienstadt to turn this ancient fortress town, built at the end of the 18th century by Emperor Joseph II of Habsburg and named after his mother, the Empress Maria Therese, into a transition camp for onward deportation to the east, i.e into a staging post.
The number of inmates it was to hold was to be ten times that of its pre-war population. These construction workers were treated like concentration camp prisoners and communication with the outside world was strictly forbidden. They were not, however, behind barbed wire, there was no need for it. Just as the town had been designed as a fortress which prevented anybody entering except through two huge and easily guarded gates, so nobody from the inside could get out either.
This younger brother had a girlfriend and tried to send her a letter. The letter was intercepted and he was condemned to be hanged. He wasn’t the only one. Hanging, in public and in secret was practiced widely by the German army and the SS all over occupied Europe and particularly in Poland and in Russia.
The rumour we received was that the rope broke and that an SA man stepped forward and shot him dead with a pistol. I remember the adults in our block of flats being upset because, so they said, under international law once the rope had snapped the prisoner had to be freed.
But then under any real system of law, except the German one, a citizen would not have been deprived of liberty, turned into a slave labourer and condemned to death without due process simply on account of his race and for sending a letter in the first place.
It just showed that one still clung to civilised ideas during an uncivilised and barbarous era. The Germans seemed to have found the change from civilised to barbarous behaviour much easier.
The older brother was caught visiting a prostitute, a part of the Old Town was a red light district. That was strictly illegal according to the Laws of Nuremberg (Nűrnberger Gesetze) of 1935 because it was a sexual act between a Jew and an Aryan although the woman was not a true Aryan as she was a Czech, therefore a Slav and therefore, by definition, of an inferior race, though not as low in the grading system as a Jew.
For the purpose of the prosecution it was however an offence. He was sentenced by a properly constituted court, if any such court can be considered properly constituted, to three years’ imprisonment. In such cases the longer the sentence the better because prison was definitely preferable to a concentration camp.
On the other hand such prisoners were never released. After serving their sentence they were sent to Auschwitz or to a similar establishment like Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, etc. Many were sent to Auschwitz long before the completion of their sentence, see “Inherit the Truth” by Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, cellist and survivor of Auschwitz and Belsen, Giles de la Mare Publishers Ltd., 1998. Anita and her sister were sentenced to a prison term for trying to flee from Breslau to France. After a few months into their sentence they were sent to Auschwitz.
Downstairs, at ground floor level, next to the entrance, lived the Blochs, father Max, mother Herta and son Gottfried or Friedl. Friedl had been a medical student at the German Charles University of Prague and would have sat for his finals if the Nazis, who ran the university long before the Munich crisis, had not prevented it.
Friedl was very interested in and studied graphology and what would now be called industrial psychology. He worked for a time for the Jewish community offices trying to fit people to courses in various trades, something prospective emigrants hoped would help them to secure a visa and enable them to earn a living abroad.
For that purpose he conducted psychotechnical tests and I remember that I too took part in one, that I squeezed a hollow rubber ball connected via a rubber tube to a pen moving along a piece of paper, indicating whether I let go gradually or suddenly, that I put a mechanical toy together and had the time I needed for completion measured and that I deciphered colour-shaded numbers or letters hidden among similar looking coloured shapes, the Rohrschach test.
Father Bloch, an accountant by profession, became a spectacle maker and repairer. In summer mother Herta would come to sit on our balcony to soak up the sun and read English detective novels. Their ground floor flat got very little light. They were sent to the ghetto on 6 March 1943, four months before us. Their flat was emptied, its contents put into a removal van to be sorted locally and distributed in Germany.
I suppose that party members kept the best bits. And their descendants still do. A German woman and child moved in. Possibly she had been bombed out in Germany, we knew nothing about her, she was the only German in the building. It was all part of their plan to make use of everything Jewish, including, of course, their homes. This would be less obvious in Prague which was never bombed and had only a small German population. The Blochs were sent from the ghetto to Auschwitz, to the notorious “family camp”, on 18 December 1943, or five months after we arrived though I never bumped into any of them.
It was a crowded place and I moved only between room and work and my mother’s large room which she shared with what seemed hundreds of other women in one of the 200 years old barracks. Friedl survived and wrote a book of his experiences. His parents were gassed in July 1944 with the rest of those considered too old for heavy work.
The Meeting Place
For something like four years our small flat was the meeting place for Dr.Leo Fantl from upstairs, Friedl Bloch from the ground floor and, until he was imprisoned, the older brother from the floor below us, the name of whom I have forgotten.
My father was a very gregarious and generous man and through his connections and the money he still had and the items he sold, he bought things on the black market, including tobacco from which I made cigarettes.
Lives of other refugees
Above I mentioned the Jewish inhabitants of our block of flats. All of them had come from the Sudeten, except for us, and because they were Czech citizens and some of them spoke Czech and had some savings in Czech currency or, in the case of the teacher, were in receipt of a pension, they were all, relatively speaking, much better off than the thousands who had come as refugees from Germany and Austria who had nothing.
I would like to remember two such adult refugees I met for a short while. One was an actor and I think he had come from Vienna. The Austrians, now incorporated in the Reich and very happy to be once again part of a large empire, had deprived him of his livelihood, he could not appear in public and he had fled to Prague just across the border.
What can a middle-aged German actor do in a Czech-speaking city? Not much. I have a speech defect, sometime I get into a spasm when trying to pronounce a word which starts with a consonant. My father thought that learning to breathe properly might help. Actors learn how to breathe properly so as not to run out of breath when delivering a long soliloquy. So I went to see him a few times in his room where he lodged.
He was surrounded by photographs of his days on the stage and of those who had been household names and who, so he claimed, had trodden the boards with him. Real or not, and the stage is a world of make-believe, this past which saw his name on billboards, however small the type, was very important to him.
There was no present. As things stood there was no future for him. All he had was the past to reassure him of his worth. And there were thousands like him. The other refugee had been a chief steward on a German passenger ship when long voyages were all made by ship. Though I am not 100% sure of the name of the ship it could have been the S.S. Bremen which rings a slight bell.
Again, what could a German-speaking ship’s steward do in Czech-speaking landlocked Prague? Very little. He came to see us to demonstrate his skills for a small fee. His skill and experience had been in organising a team of German waiters on a large floating restaurant between German and American ports, which wasn’t much use in the present situation.
What he did do was to show us how to lay a dinner table properly. As we still had a few plates and knives, forks and spoons of various sizes we supplied the tools of the trade, as it were. He then performed his show-stopper, pulling away the tablecloth without upsetting anything, particularly the glasses. Quite unreal in the circumstances, but what else could he do? Both of them faded from the scene never to be heard of again.
The Initial Progress of the War
Blows came in rapid succession. The performance of the German Army and Air Force probably exceeded their own expectation and caused deep despondency in us. The Germans had swept through Poland in less than five weeks (01.09.1939 to 04.10.1939) until they had reached the line agreed with the Soviets by the secret Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 23 August of that year.
They then walked through Holland and Belgium (10.05.1940 -28.05.1940) and had defeated France in record time (14.05.1940 - 22.06.1940). Their progress along that front had been phenomenal.
From the bombing of Rotterdam on 10 May 1939, showing what barbarism Germany was capable of, to the fall of Holland, it had taken them just 18 days. From the crossing of the French frontier with Belgium on 14 May 1940 to the fall of Paris on 16 June 1940, the defeat of France took less than five weeks, less than it had taken Germany and Russia to knock out Poland.
A Russia siding with Nazi Germany was very frightening indeed. Then there was a lull in further expansion though that was a preparation for such an expansion, namely what was to become known as the Battle of Britain. May be the Battle of Britain was not a lull, but it thwarted Germany’s immediate ambition to invade Great Britain but not necessarily for ever.
Starting on 9 April 1940, by October that battle in the sky was over but news were no better on another front and Germany’s triumphant announcements of British commercial tonnage sunk by her large fleet of U-boats and of British battleships sunk by Germany’s “pocket battleships” made us despair.
Time was not on our side. I remember my father bringing home a very large and detailed map of France. That would be just before the end of the “phoney war”. During the evening meetings they were going to follow the progress as the two armies were going to slog it out, a repeat of 1914-1918. Hardly had the map been spread out before it was put away again. Neutral countries, like Switzerland and Sweden, supplied Germany with high-grade steel, ball bearings and raw materials for cash, for gold looted from Jews as it turned out later.
The prizes of German victories were France’s coal, Czech grain, Škoda’s tanks and guns, Polish and Ukrainian cheap forced labour, all for the asking. No fewer than 2 million French soldiers were interned for work in Germany, as were the remnants of the Polish army which I met in Friedland. In peacetime a week, a month, or even a year here or there may not matter, to us every day mattered. The news from North Africa, Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece, Crete, etc. was no better.
Making Cigarettes
My job was to make the ration of cigarettes for the evening meetings. The tobacco came in small, square packages, something like an inch thick and four by four inches wide. It was of course Balkan Tobacco and came from Bosnia-Hercegovina. I put it into an old mahogany cigar box, spread it out flat, covered it with blotting paper cut to the exact size, put thin slices of potato on the blotting paper and shut the lid. That gave it the right amount of moisture.
I was supplied with empty, preformed cigarette paper tubes with a filter tip and a pusher consisting of a thin metal rod with a wooden handle at one end and a widened metal part, similar to the head of a nail, at the other.
The other essential tool was a split metal tube hinged along its entire length. The tube was opened, tobacco was spread uniformly along its length equal to just over the length of the cigarette, it was clicked shut, inserted into the end of the paper tube and the pusher used to transfer the tobacco from the metal tube into the paper tube.
The now empty metal tube was withdrawn and the pusher used to give the end of the cigarette a flat finish. On the day that the visitors were due I would prepare a given number of cigarettes. I never saw them smoke though. Ours was a one-bedroom flat. My parents slept in the one bedroom and I slept in the living room. My bedtime was 8:00pm sharp and I got into my parents' bed for my first round of sleep.
The visitors came and went - the window was open to air the room. I would get up and help turn the settee over. The settee was a German patented affair on which my uncle Fritz had slept as a young man after he had left the orphanage and had moved in with his mother. It was a settee on one horizontal side with a bed underneath. One would lift the settee part, first one end which would click into the raised position then do the same with the other end.
If two were doing it simultaneously the settee would be raised in one go and turned quite easily through 180 degrees about the hinge, one on either side, which came into play in the raised position. One would then get hold of two handles, step on a lever at floor level, that would disengage the mechanism which had kept it in the elevated position, and one would let it down.
It was now a bed if one raised the hinged metal headrests, one at either end, which had held the bedding in place in the upside down position. All very ingenious. I then got into this, my own, bed and carried on sleeping. The interruption did me no harm at all.
The Day the Germans Arrived
I estimate that we lived about 3 miles from the edge of the Old Town in the centre of which the school was situated. There were trams in the old town but they didn’t take me home. Rather than change trams it was easier to walk through the narrow streets to the edge of the Old Town and take a tram from there.
Where I emerged from the Old Town was the námĕsti republiky, the Square of the Republic from where I could see the Prašná Brána, the Powder Tower, a very tall, massive, turreted, medieval stone tower with arches at ground level so tall that traffic passes nowadays through them, where gunpowder had been stored during the wars with Gustav Adolph of Sweden (1632?).
Before the war an ancient standard hung from the wall of the Alt-Neu ancient synagogue in Prague, given to the Jews for helping to defend the town. It must have been early afternoon of 15 March 1939 that I emerged from the Old Town on my way home. It was snowing hard, large flakes tumbling down reducing visibility, I could just about make out the Powder Tower. The sight I beheld has never left me. It was of German troops on motorcycles with sidecars, the sidecars had a light machinegun mounted on the front.
There were also large military trucks towing a trailer of equally large size. The trucks and trailers were empty and many more arrived during the next few days. These were the mechanical equivalent of locusts and meant for looting. The Republic had emerged from the depression. Czechoslovakia was in all respects self-sufficient, the Czech parts was industrial with a highly skilled workforce and also agriculture, Slovakia was just agriculture. Food was excellent and plentiful, clothing material, shoes, etc. were all locally manufactured and of very good quality.
In Germany, on the other hand, food was scarce, they preferred guns to butter and the guns were to reap other people’s butter. In Germany “Ersatz” (substitute) was the order of the day and has even crept into English. After the trucks had come and gone there was nothing left. The German Fifth Column had once again done its work, the German army knew exactly where to go. German soldiers fingered the cloth of Czech uniforms with astonishment, it compared rather favourably with their own.
I remembered German troops only too well from my recent Berlin days. To see them after we had hoped, rather optimistically, to have left them behind for good, hit me hard. We had, after all, not escaped and we would now not be in the position of protected foreigners. We were trapped. The Czechs around me were in tears. Their world too had collapsed though not to the same extent as ours. They had been handed over to the tender mercies of fascists by the so-called “free world” on which they had relied, with which they had identified and had signed treaties of protection with.
That shock had a lasting effect and helped the Communists to win the first election after the war and, once in power, they couldn’t get rid of them for another 42 years.
My School after the German Invasion
The German occupation caused the once empty school to be filled to the brim. Jewish children were now forbidden to attend even Czech schools, never mind German ones, and many of them, not all, came over to the Jewish one which had to work in two shifts, either one attended during the morning or in the afternoon.
Even so classes were large. My class photo shows 49 children and a few had already been deported before the photo was taken. The school also took on new teachers who, just as they had done in Berlin and all over Germany, had lost their posts in the public sector.
Quite apart from the inherent lack of facilities it is most likely that the German occupiers dictated the content of the syllabus and it was not their intention to educate Jews who were to be used only as cheap labour on heavy work anyway or, the only other alternative, were to be killed as indeed they were.
So what did we do at school? I remember doing German, that was of course compulsory, but I knew it anyway and so did allof the refugee children who made up a large part of the class, and school.
We also did Czech grammar which by then I knew too, we did Czech literature but at a very low level, and the geography of Bohemia and Moravia, i.e. its rivers, and as we were confined to Prague and couldn’t go on excursions to give this geography some meaning that was pretty boring.
We had hardly any homework, with the very large classes and a class in the morning and a different one in the afternoon the teachers could not have coped. We did not learn Hebrew and we did not go through the Old Testament in translation even though Dr.Glanzberg had a degree in Semitic languages and the huge Hebrew books in his parents’ house were collectors’ items.
May be the Germans can be blamed. On the other hand he played the violin until it had to be handed in, and taught us Yiddish songs. A keen chess player he organised class tournaments, he was a wonderful man. There was also a tall and gaunt Mr.Stein, also a teacher of religion which he didn’t teach. There was the couple Pick who disappeared and were rumoured to have been shot because they were alleged to have been Communists. Terrible, but one should not forget that they would have been killed anyway, if not by bullet than by gas or being worked to death.
This couple had been adventurous, they had been as far as India, something most unusual for central Europeans. I remember Mr.Pick asking the class once whether we knew what Indians looked like. We didn't know, we had never seen one, in those days they hadn’t ventured as far as Prague either. He told us that they looked like us, their features were the same except for the colour of their skin and I still think that that was a fair description.
The Sports Centre
The Jewish community, or may be it was a Jewish sports club, owned a large open air sports centre located at the end of a district called Vinohrady and across the road from one side of the cemetery where I was to work in 1942/43. It had a football pitch surrounded by a running track, an area for high jump, a long sand pit for long jump, a small circle for putting the shot and adjacent to it were tennis courts. In winter water was poured onto the courts which were thus transformed into ice rinks.
I remember skating there during the first and second winter after our arrival in Prague. I had learned the art of not falling on the hard ice in Berlin. In those days boys wore lace-up boots and skates could be fitted to them quite easily, a cheap and efficient system, it took next to no time to attach and detach them.
In summer the elderly would play chess to a high standard on an area between the track and the tennis courts. During the summer vacation Mrs. Pick would give us talks there. The one I remember was the psychology of observation, some people have an overall view, some can only concentrate on a small area. I think of her every time I pick blackberries in the wood here, I can only see what is right in front of me, the same applies at home.
I have been unable to find out anything about the couple Pick because I cannot remember their first names. There was a large number of Picks and without a first name they cannot be identified, the cards on the index not containing people’s jobs. There is no record of the school’s teachers or children
The Class Photo
Above is a copy of a photo of my class. It was taken shortly before the school was closed by German decree in June 1942 as were all remaining Jewish schools in Germany and occupied Europe. I put the date of the photo at the third week in May 1942. The exact date is on the back of the original. The original is with Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and is glued to a testimony form I filled in for Dr.Glanzberg. It cannot be removed and nobody there had the sense to make a note of what was written on the back. I cannot be far out. My friend Kurt Diamant is not in the picture. He was deported with his mother on 28.04.1942 so the photo was taken after that date.
My friend Kurt Herschmann is on the photo and he was deported on 10.06.1942 so that the picture must have been taken after that date and a few weeks either way hardly matters.
At the last count there were 49 children in the picture of whom six, including myself, survived. I am the boy at the back, the arrow pointing at me. All of us wear the yellow star, some of us are smiling at the camera, children do, and we didn’t know what was in store for us.
The photo was hidden with the rest of the family photos, returned to me after the war and is one of a handful which I took with me to England in June 1946. In November 1977, we lived in St.Annes-on-Sea in Lancashire at the time, a relative living in Liverpool wrote to me to say that Yad Vashem was keen to obtain mementoes of the Holocaust via local organisations.
They had advertised in the Journal of the Association of Jewish Refugees and the Board of Deputies would act as collector. I sent the photo to the Board, then at Woburn House in London, with a resumé of my experience and I also returned some six Pages of Testimony of parents, relatives and Dr.Glanzberg.
I had made no copy of the photo because, believing that I was the only survivor, and I wasn’t far out, looking at it caused me to become uneasy, painful and uncomfortable, the guilt of the survivor, why me? Also at that time there was not yet any public, school or research interest in the Holocaust. That came 14 years later, in 1991, with the release of the film “Schindler’s List, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Once interest surfaced I wrote to Yad Vashem, mentioned my letter of 1977 of which I had kept a copy, and asked for a copy of the photo. Now it had its uses, e.g. schools might be interested. They couldn't find it, they couldn't trace it. They referred me back to Woburn House which came up with some outlandish explanations. What annoyed me was that Yad Vashem kept asking for photos yet made no use of those which they already had and it had no system of retrieving what was already in their steel cabinets.
In 1999 I wrote once more to Yad Vashem. This time in connection with Dr.Glanzberg whose first name had appeared incorrectly as “Ira” in stead of “Jiří”, the Czech for “George”, in various archives which are all derived from one original source.
That is, un-fortunately, not unique. My mother’s name was “Toni” and her name appears as “Tonča” on the index of the deported and on the wall of the Pinchas Synagogue. Yad Vashem looked once again through their collection of “Pages of Testimony” of which they sent me a copy of those I had sent them and there, attached to one side, was my class photo. Whoever had dealt with my consignment of pages and photos had, quite reasonably, stuck the class photo to the class teacher’s form but had failed, quite unreasonably, to cross-reference to my form although I appear quite clearly as the donor, and had likewise failed to note the date written on its back before glueing it to Dr.Glanzberg’s page, the worst way to affix anything.
Since the photo could not be removed I was sent a scanned floppy disc of it and a neighbour converted it into a print because I had no computer at the time. I had heard of a Jewish Museum in Prague and that it published newsletters. I wrote to the museum, enclosed a copy of the photo and asked for it to be published with a request for possible survivors to contact me and, if possible, to put some names to faces after 57 years.
The Museum did publish my search notice but didn’t send me copy of the issue in which the photo appeared. The photo was however spotted by Eva Pressburger, formerly Eva Ginzová whose work, she is an artist living in Israel, was reviewed and some of her work reproduced in the same issue.
She did receive a copy and recognised two girls whom she knew and who were still alive, her cousin Hanna Ginzová, now Hana Škorpilová and living in Prague, 6th in second row from the right in checkered dress, and Marta Kleinová, now Marta Goldberg, now living in Jerusalem, middle of 3rd row, 5th from right and left.
At the time the photo was taken Chava Pressburger was 12 years old and in a class below mine. She had a brother, Peter Ginz, who was 14 and in a class above mine. This brother Peter found fame in the ghetto and posthumously in books for the contribution he made to the secret children’s publication “Vedem” (We lead) on Theresienstadt, many issues of which are preserved. The two surviving fellow pupils were able to identify between them 39 of the children on the photo.
Of the 49 children 43 were murdered. I have extracts from the Prague archives of 11 classmates, 9 of whom were murdered in Auschwitz, one in Maly Trostinec and one in Sobibor. The last two of these extermination camps account for at least 215,000 murdered Jews Of the six survivors four were alive in 2001, one had died of cancer in Israel.
Kurt Herschmann
Kurt Herschmann was a classmate, a fellow scout and my best friend. On the photo he is in the 2nd row from the front, second from the right, not looking at the camera. A small boy who suffered from excema on his neck, possibly brought on by stress, came from Munich in Germany. His mother had escaped with Kurt to Barcelona, not a place to be since Franco’s victory in March 1939. They left Spain for Prague, also the destination of her brother. They lived in one room partitioned by a sheet suspended from a linen line.
His uncle tried to make a living repairing shoes. Not easy, nothing was easy because his prospective customers, the fellow refugees, had no money to pay for the work. The Reichsprotector was one Reinhard Heydrich who had presided at the Wannsee Conference which had decided on the implementation of the Final Solution. He was assassinated by two men sent by the SOE, the Special Operations Executive, from England.
As a reprisal, or one of several reprisals, the annihilation of the village of Lidice was another one, 1,000 Jews were sent by transport AAh on 10 June 1942 toUjazdow in Poland where they were shot on arrival, Kurt, Kurt’s mother Wilhelmina and her brother among them. Another 2 000Jews were sent from Theresienstadt to an unknown destination in the East and they too were shot on arrival.
Kurt Diamant
Kurt Diamant was also a good friend of mine. A sturdy boy he was good at sport. As the school had no gym we used to go to the Maccabi Hall not far from the school where our instructor was Freddy Hirsch, a young man from Germany with shiny black hair and a tremendous physique whom we greatly admired.
He was to take poison in the Auschwitz Familienlager. During a boxing bout, with proper gloves and quite a friendly match, Kurt landed a punch on the side of my nose which is still bent sideways to this day. Kurt and his mother had escaped from Vienna. I never asked where his father was or what had happened to him. Obviously something had happened to him otherwise all three would have been together, so one didn’t ask and the explanation was not volunteered.
His mother, Gisela, tried to scrape a living as a dressmaker but in those days the minds of Jewish women was not set on new dresses, quite apart from the restriction that Jews didn’t get clothing coupons. As Appendix “B” shows, Jews had also to hand in sewing machines.
Everything was done to make life difficult. May be she carried out the odd alteration but theirs was a life of poverty, like that of most refugees caught up in Prague. Kurt and his mother were sent from Prague to the ghetto by transport Ao on 28 April 1942 and deported immediately to Zamosc in Poland on 30 April 1942 by transport As. Of that transport of 1,000 men, women and children 19 survived, a relatively large number. Kurt and his mother were not among them.
Only two transports were sent from the ghetto to Zamosc. The first one, Ar, had left the ghetto two days earlier, on 28 April 1942. Of that transport of 1,000 only five survived.
The Two Teachers
Of the two teachers on the class photo only Dr.Rand, the teacher on the left, survived. I met him in Prague shortly after the war when he told me that he had been a slave labourer in a plant manufacturing poison gas for use by the German army (never used for fear of retaliation in kind) and that slave labourers were not issued with gas masks and that there had been leaks.
He therefore didn’t probably survive for long. Dr.George Glanzberg, the teacher on the right, was sent to the Auschwitz Familienlager (family camp) on 18 May 1944, Transport Eb. To make the ghetto look less overcrowded when the Swiss Committee of the Red Cross was due 7,503 inmates of the ghetto were sent there on 15, 16, and 18 May. 401, or 5.3% survived. Dr.Glanzberg was not among them. According to Prague archives he was born on 21 September 1912 and died a young man.
Zionist Movements
Some of us, mainly refugee children, had joined Zionist organisations, possibly out of true conviction that a Jewish State, had it existed, would have saved us and that its existence in future was imperative for that reason, i.e. to provide a refuge and where one could live without threats to one’s life should we survive.
In the hour of need nobody had wanted us, that was the stark fact. The other reason was to have company. One therefore joined the movement to which one’s friends already belonged, strictly the ideology of the various Zionist strands didn’t come into it. Thus I joined Techelet-Lavan, a Boy Scout type organisation and at first our meetings consisted of travelling by tram to one of the terminals and walking from there in the countryside.
Since I had a father, and that father still had a little bit of money, I provided the knackwurst, a type of German sausage, which we held on a stick over an open fire. When it was cooked the skin split with a sound like “knak”, hence its name.
Around that open fire we also sang Zionist songs and made knots. My father recognised the melodies of these songs from his time in Russia. They had originally been anti-Tsarist revolutionary songs which Russian Jews had taken to Palestine after the failed revolution of 1905. As a result of deportations and not being allowed to travel on trams the Jewish Scout movement faded away too.
All the children on the class photo wear a yellow six-sided star with “Jude” written in its centre in letters imitating Hebrew script. To some it was humiliating, which it was intended to be, to others it was just one of the many pinpricks we were constantly subjected to. To others it led to social isolation, non-Jews didn’t want to be seen talking to a Jew because association with Jews carried a social stigma, you associated with the underclass and it was now very obvious who was Jewish, one could not hide it or pretend otherwise.
This would have been more noticeable in Germany and Austria, not so much among Czechs but then, as far as refugees were concerned, there were very few points of contact with them anyway. Somebody, probably a whole department with offices in Berlin, thought of something new to make life more miserable by the week before the ultimate end. The principle was nothing new.
It was common in medieval Europe for Jews to be obliged to wear a yellow piece of cloth on their outer garment. And that too was only one of many restrictions they were subjected to. Nothing new under the sun then although one had hoped that medieval mentality had been laid to rest. It hadn’t. One aspect of the star was that it was very conspicuous, as intended.
Anybody who wanted to take out his frustration, annoyance, progress of the war, pure anti-Semitism on a Jew was quite sure that his victim was the intended victim. The Jew couldn’t retaliate, even defend himself or complain to the police because he had no civil rights. There was e.g. a curfew from 8:00 pm and it was obvious that, if a being with a star was seen on the streets after that time he, or she, was trespassing and that could have serious consequences.
I remember visiting a school friend at the other end of Prague with Fred Fantl who lived with his parents and younger sister on the floor above us and also attended the same Jewish school. I remember to this day that our hosts tried to teach us to play poker but that, unlike to chess, I didn’t take to cards. Anyway, we were youngsters, something like 12 or 13 years old, messed about, hadn’t looked at the clock and left it too late to get home on time.
We had to walk, Jews were not permitted on public transport. We walked briskly. Not far from home there was a very long fence along the footway behind which was a German garrison. It had been Czech and the Germans had taken it over, as they had everything else.
During the day we could hear them singing: “Denn wir fahren gegen Engelland”, we fly against England. We noticed that they stopped singing it after their failure to win the Battle of Britain, which was to be the preliminary to the invasion of Great Britain, by October 1940. We took comfort from that of course but the battle against the Jews continued unabated and as these were defenceless they won. I remember running along the length of the fence and being completely out of breath.
Home wasn’t very far after that and naturally our parents had been worried stiff. The point I am trying to make is that wearing a yellow star and running after the curfew made us more conspicuous than ever. Why were we running? It is quite possible that as this was a Czech area with no other Jews about anybody we may have met may not even have heard that Jews were not permitted to be about after a certain hour, likewise a German soldier on guard duty may not have been aware of it.
On the other hand both types may have been aware of it and may or may not have taken an interest in us. Children to-day seem to be concerned whether they wear clothes with the fashionable designer label. We had other concerns and cares and we were deprived of even a modest childhood.
The yellow star presented practical difficulties. Only a few of these were issued to each Jew. They were made of very poor material and frayed only too easily. They had to be worn on the outer garment. In winter that meant on the coat. On going out one would put on the coat with the star and take it off on returning. While in the public domain it was on display. In the pre-Nazi era one would have taken off one’s coat in office or a public place like in a café.
By now Jews had lost all employment where they would have come into contact with non-Jews (Aryans) and cafés and restaurants were out of bounds, prohibited areas, as was any public performance, sports stadia, cinemas, etc. Summer was quite different. If one started the day wearing a jacket over one’s shirt then, as long as one was on a street one had to keep the jacket with the star on, however hot it became.
If one wore just a shirt or a tee-shirt the star had to be sown onto that shirt or tee-shirt and removed and sewn on again every time they were washed, i.e. very often. At that rate the star wouldn’t last very long.
Ingenious devices were used. The star was mounted on stiff cardboard with press studs at each corner of the star so that the star could be removed and fastened on again without damaging it too much if it was done carefully. It did mean however sewing on very accurately many press studs and the question always remained whether this system complied with the requirement that the star had to be affixed to the garment. Such were our preoccupations.
Clothing and Sewing Machines
Clothing in general was a problem. Jews were not allocated clothing coupons. Children though didn’t stop growing and shoes, heels and soles wore out and in any case didn’t last as long as the tough plastic of to-day. Those were the days of poor wartime leather. Girls’ dresses and skirts became shorter and shorter, quite embarrassingly so, the age of the miniskirt was yet to come and likewise boys’ trousers and shirts became shorter and tighter.
Of course that was an optical illusion, clothing remained the same size, it was the children who grew taller. I remember having a pair of my father’s trousers converted into knickerbockers and the overlap of some 4in at the knee provided room for future growth. But then I was lucky, I had a father who had a spare pair of trousers.
Where our side street met the main road there was a line of shops and in the upstairs room above one of them there was a shoemaker with several journeymen and apprentices. In pre-war days, with the exception of Baťa shops which sold ready-made footwear, a pioneer in mass production, shoes were made by hand on a wooden last made to the wearer’s exact shape and which, therefore, fitted.
My father had a pair of shoes made there for me which also eventually became too small and didn’t do my feet any good, but few people had the money or the connection to do what was strictly black market and many refugee children had the disadvantage of existing without having a father around anyway. In so many respects I was the exception, not the rule.
Needless to say sewing machines had to be handed in. These would have made alterations much easier but all such useful and valuable gadgets, from radios to musical instruments, from binoculars to bicycles, from ski equipment to medical and dental equipment, from typewriters to furs and woollens, anything that would help the German war effort, and included in that was also gold, silver and other valuables, had to be handed over to the Jewish community offices from where it was collected by German officials.
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