Part 5 (1/2)

What could it mean? Ela wondered. Why of all people were the Frohlich children being brought to the ghetto by special transport? Years later Frta related what had happened to her siblings the previous night.

It was early in 1943. The transports had been running in high gear for over a year. My brothers and sisters and I were living at the orphanage on Belgicka at the time. One evening, word suddenly came that the Frohlich children were to report to the Gestapo the next morning. We didn't know why. The next morning we were all taken to Gestapo headquarters. Even Ruzenka, who was in the hospital on Lublanska with pneumonia, was fetched and brought to the Gestapo. Once we were there, we were locked in a cold, dark cellar. There was nothing to eat or drink. Only the several layers of clothing and the coats that we had put on just in case provided a little warmth. Late that afternoon we were taken to be interrogated. We didn't know what they wanted from us. They treated us like criminals. The first thing they did was to take my brother Jenda's lovely watch away. He had only recently been given this watch at his bar mitzvah in the synagogue on Maislova, where he had sung beautifully. He had received other gifts as well. Everything we had with us was confiscated: identification papers, rings, a little silver necklace, money. When my ring wouldn't come off, the SS man screamed at me and threatened to chop off my finger. The German was starting to come toward me when Jenda placed himself in front of me to protect me, and was given a hard kick by the SS man, while at the same time my little brother Jarda, only eleven at the time, threw himself at the SS man. Jenda had already tried to settle him down and told him to stay calm. But at that moment Jarda, who could get very angry and was a fighter by nature, could no longer control his temper and threw himself at the SS man and bit his hand, but the SS man just flung him to one side.We were terrified of what would happen next. But the German didn't do anything to him and just said, ”You're the only one I like. I'd like to have a courageous son like you.” Meanwhile, I had been turning so hard at the ring on my finger that it finally came off. Then we had to sign something. The boys signed their names very quickly, but I took my time and scribbled mine. The Gestapo man grabbed me by the hair, banged my head against the wall, and shouted at me that my name wasn't Frohlichova, but Frohlich. My sister Zdenka signed correctly because Jenda told her to. Our youngest, Ruzenka, couldn't write yet. Besides, she had a fever of over 104 degrees. She lay on the stone floor, and the booted SS men kicked her. When we circled around to protect her, they kicked us. Then they put us all back in the cellar.

Marta Frohlich had a special friend in Room 28: Eva Winkler. Marta liked this girl with her blue eyes and striking long dark eyelashes. Eva was a girl with a heart, considerate and loving-just like her father, Fritz Winkler, who took the Frohlich children under his wing when he saw how vulnerable their situation in the ghetto was.

The first few days after their arrival in Theresienstadt, they had to spend their nights on a plank frame in an overcrowded barracks, in the farthest corner of a long hallway. Behind their sleeping quarters, separated only by a thin wall of boards, was a toilet bucket that could be reached only by stepping over the planks on which the children were supposed to sleep-and, of course, their sleep was constantly disrupted. They were liberated from ”Hotel WC,” as Marta calls their first quarters in Theresienstadt, a few days later by their uncle Franta, who was already living in the ghetto, only to wind up in an old barracks where the stench was not as intense, but where they suffered from the icy cold. What good was an old stove in a corner of the room, when there was neither wood nor coal to heat it-not even a match to light it?

It was Fritz Winkler who came to the aid of the Frolich children. He worked in a carpentry workshop, and now and then he was able to slip them some wood to heat the stove. And he soon became a fatherly friend-just what they so desperately needed. Their own father, who had arrived in the ghetto shortly after they did, was the same man in Theresienstadt as he had always been-angry and short-tempered. ”We once brought him something to eat,” Marta recalls. ”And he went wild and almost hit us-because it was so little! The other men in the room came to our aid. They were furious at him, and almost clobbered him because he didn't appreciate what we had brought him.”

Things were very different with Eva Winkler. She appreciated Marta's gifts. When Marta discovered her pa.s.sion for collecting the slips of paper that Palmera razor blades came wrapped in, she asked her two brothers to ”organize” as many as they could for her new friend, thus adding to Eva's already considerable collection. Eva treated this collection like a treasure trove. What a disaster it would be if even one of these prettily ill.u.s.trated papers were to disappear! Eva would have been miserable, as is evident from a little song the girls made up and merrily sang sometimes: ”Herr Winkler's daughter's sobs can be heard, / a tragedy has now occurred. / It's lost, it's lost-you ask what's lost? / The Palmeras have been lost. / Yes, yes, yes / it's as clear as day / Yes, yes, yes / it's true in its way.”

One day Eva showed her new friend something quite different-the pictures she had painted with Friedl d.i.c.ker-Brandeis. ”I'd love to learn to do that, too. It's lovely!” Marta said in astonishment. Shortly after that, Eva took her along for drawing lessons in Room 28.

For many children, art cla.s.ses with Friedl d.i.c.ker-Brandeis were bright stars in the gloom of the ghetto. ”During art cla.s.s I was oblivious to everything else,” Helga recalls. ”There was only that big table with the painting supplies, even though the paper was nothing much, sometimes just waste paper or packing paper from some old packages. But at these moments I felt like a free human being.”

The children painted and drew, did handicrafts, and made collages. Friedl supplied the paints, brushes, pencils, and paper, and often brought a few art books or objects that served as models-a vase, a Dutch wooden shoe, a teapot. One day, she would offer a theme-an animal in a landscape, or would simply say, ”Storm, wind, evening-paint it!” Another day, she would sketch a fantasy story in a few sentences or would say nothing more than ”Paint where you would like to be now. Paint what you wish for yourself. Paint whatever means a great deal to you.” Or, ”Look out the window and paint what you see.”

There was usually a hush while the children worked. Friedl radiated a magical aura that inspired them. ”You didn't have to draw well. That was not what really mattered,” Helga says, describing her teaching method. ”The crucial thing was that you developed your talents, that you learned to see. To recognize colors. To play with colors. To move your hand in time to music or a specific rhythm. For example, she would rap out a certain tempo on the table, and we were supposed to draw according to the rhythm. Her method of instruction gave us moments of lightheartedness. She had a capacity for awakening in us a positive att.i.tude toward our condition, toward life in Theresienstadt. In her presence everything seemed to fall into place-more or less all on its own.”

When she entered Room 28, Friedl did not always find calm, disciplined pupils who were eager to paint. Sometimes they were anything but. But in a flash, Friedl was able to engage the children in her subject. Most often it was rhythmic exercises that helped. ”Besides making the painter's hand and whole person light and flexible, such exercises are an appropriate means by which to turn an unruly mob of individuals into a working group ready to devote itself cooperatively to a cause,” she wrote in a report in mid-1943, on the first anniversary of the establishment of the Theresienstadt Children's Homes. ”Moreover, they lift the child out of old habits of thinking and seeing [and] present the child with a task that can be fulfilled with delight and fantasy and yet with the greatest precision.”5 Friedl loved children, and children loved her. This small, energetic woman with short, light brown hair, hazelnut brown eyes, and a gentle, bright voice was always cordial, always calm and patient with them. She did not reprimand the children, push them too hard, or coerce them in any way. Using fantasy and intuition, she set about her work in a playful spirit. She watched with interest her pupils' first, hesitant efforts at painting, cautiously asked questions, casually steered their attention. Above all, she encouraged the children to follow their own ideas and inspirations, and to give them graphic expression. One of her basic principles was: ”Let the child be free to express himself.”

Friedl d.i.c.ker-Brandeis was forty-four years old when she, her husband, Pavel Brandeis, and her friend Laura imko arrived in Theresienstadt on December 17, 1942, on transport ”Ch” from Hradec Kralove. In acknowledgment of her career as an artist, she was first a.s.signed to the ”Technical Department,” a sort of engineering office whose official task was the production of whatever technical drawings the ghetto needed. But this SS-sanctioned activity produced creative work that doc.u.mented the reality of life in the ghetto-studies, sketches, paintings, posters- hundreds of works in all. The department was headed by the painter Bedich Fritta (aka Fritz Taussig). At his side were experienced colleagues: Otto Ungar, Leo Haas, Felix Bloch, Jo Spier, the young Peter Kien, and others.

The strict doc.u.mentary realism characteristic of these artists was not really in Friedl's nature. Her understanding of art was nourished by other sources. Her interests moved her in a different direction, and soon, following her inner desires, she was to be found only among the children.

In her cla.s.ses Friedl pa.s.sed on her rich trove of experience in both artistic and human realms, rousing in the children latent energies that could function as a positive counterweight to their oppressive existence and that could restore their psychological balance. She awakened memories of what was good in the children's past and strengthened their hope for a better future. And she helped them recapture some of their self-confidence and build up their courage. In this way she lived up to her credo: ”Wherever energy reflects upon itself and, without fear of appearing ridiculous, attempts to prevail on its own, a new source of creativity opens up-and that is the goal of our attempts to teach drawing.”

Proof that she succeeded, if only for a few hours, is found in the more than three thousand drawings created by children under her leaders.h.i.+p- each one a child's witness to life in the ghetto. They offer a message different from that of the drawings and paintings by Theresienstadt's adult artists, who were committed to doc.u.mentary realism. This was the case not only because children painted and drew these pictures, but also because the work of these children reveals the influence of a particular school of art and of a very modern theory of artistic pedagogy. These children's drawings-some of which can be considered works of art- are the result of an ambitious professional method of instruction and the influence of an extraordinarily gifted teacher.

Born Friederike d.i.c.ker in Vienna on July 30, 1898, she began her education in art as a sixteen-year-old pupil of Franz Cizek at the Vienna School of Applied Arts. Cizek, whose drawing and painting cla.s.ses were founded on the principle of the free development of spontaneous artistic expression, helped give birth to what would ultimately become modern art therapy. Cizek and Johannes Itten, whose private art school Friedl attended a year later, gave her the crucial foundation for her own work. It was above all Itten's artistic instruction-which was based on chiaroscuro, color composition, and rhythmic drawing exercises, and on the principle of recognizing and appreciating individual expression-that provided the fundamental methodology for her work as an artist.

Friedl d.i.c.ker-Brandeis (18981944) When Johannes Itten was invited by Walter Gropius to be part of the Bauhaus in 1919, Friedl followed her teacher to Weimar. The innovative concepts of this most influential art school of the twentieth century matched the ideas and expectations of the young art student eager to put theory into practice. ”There is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman. The artist is the exalted craftsman,” Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, proclaimed in a prospectus that called for an end to traditional idealized concepts of art and for the enn.o.blement of the work of the craftsman.

For the next four years Friedl studied all that the Bauhaus had to offer: textile design with Georg Muche, lithography with Lyonel Feininger, and theater design with Oskar Schlemmer and Lothar Schreyer. She learned bookbinding, graphic design, weaving, and embroidery. After Paul Klee arrived at the Bauhaus in 1921, she never missed one of his lectures-or any opportunity to watch over her revered master's shoulder as he worked. Along with Franz Cizek and Johannes Itten, it was above all Paul Klee who became the inspiration for her remarkable pedagogical achievements, which ultimately reached their full maturity in her art cla.s.ses in Theresienstadt.

”As the former director and founder of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, I followed the artistic work of Fraulein d.i.c.ker with great interest,” wrote Walter Gropius in 1931 in a letter of recommendation for his former student. In that same year, in addition to her work in her design firm, Atelier Singer-d.i.c.ker, in Vienna, she also began her career as an art instructor for kindergartens. ”During this period she always distinguished herself by her unusual and extraordinary artistic talent and thus attracted the attention of the entire faculty to her work. The variety of her talents and her great energy resulted in accomplishments and works that were among the very best of the inst.i.tute.”6 Indeed, numerous objects bear witness to her inexhaustible creative energies: posters, invitations, book designs, embroidered pieces, set and costume designs (for Berthold Viertel and Bertolt Brecht, among others), drawings, paintings, sculpture, furniture, interior designs, and photo collages. These works of art were created during her student days, in the Werkstatten Bildender Kunst (Workshop for Fine Arts) in Berlin, which she had opened together with fellow student and friend Franz Singer in 1923, and, from 1926 to 1931, in Vienna in the Atelier Singer-d.i.c.ker, whose renown soon spread well beyond that city.

Beginning in 1933, the changing times began to make themselves felt in Friedl's life. Sometime during the February 1934 uprising in Vienna, which resulted in several hundred casualties and imprisonments, Friedl was arrested for being a member of the banned Communist Party. Released from prison that same year, she fled to Prague, where she remained until 1938. These years were marked by two crucial turning points in her life. In the aftermath of her imprisonment and flight, and after having broken off a complicated longtime love affair with her professional partner, Franz Singer, Friedl underwent a period of introspection and inner withdrawal. Her new orientation found its artistic expression in a series of new paintings-portraits, landscapes, still lifes, cityscapes-that announced her emanc.i.p.ation from the influences of the Bauhaus and the development of her own unique style. On a personal level, it also led to a new partners.h.i.+p with Pavel Brandeis, whom she married in 1936.

Following her inclination to work with children, Friedl set up a children's art studio in her apartment in Prague. It was attended mainly by children of German-speaking Prague families and by children of emigrants from Germany and Austria, among them Georg Eisler, son of the composer Hanns Eisler. One of Friedl's most talented students was Edith Kramer, who had moved to Prague from Vienna in order to stay close to her teacher and master. At the age of twenty she became Friedl's a.s.sistant. ”I knew that I couldn't learn nearly as much from anyone else as from Friedl. She was an inspired and wonderful teacher,” she would later say of her mentor.7 Friedl's circle grew smaller with each pa.s.sing day. More and more friends were saying farewell. She herself could have emigrated; she had a certificate from Palestine in hand. But she didn't want to leave her husband and his family. ”I cannot go,” she said when saying goodbye to her friend Wally Fischer. ”Theoretically I could leave for Palestine tomorrow. But I have a task to do here, Wally. I have to stay, no matter what happens.”8 It is difficult to say today how she conceived this task. We know only one thing: Friedl, who so desperately wanted a child, had a miscarriage during that time. This trauma might have led her to think that she was not meant to be a mother of a single child, but rather a teacher of art to many children.

”I believe,” Edith Kramer would later say, ”that it worked to the benefit of the children of Theresienstadt that she herself did not have a child. Otherwise she would have found a way to save herself. And the children of Theresienstadt would never have had those wonderful experiences with her.”

In the summer of 1938, Friedl and Pavel moved to Hronov, a small town northeast of Prague, near the Polish border. They managed to lead a modest life there. And Friedl, though not used to life in a provincial town, enjoyed the picturesque surroundings, which became a source of new energy for her.

”This life has ransomed me from a thousand deaths by allowing me to paint with earnest diligence, and it is as if I have freed myself from some guilt whose cause I do not know,” she wrote to a girlfriend shortly after arriving in Hronov9 Friedl threw herself into her painting with the utmost intensity. She painted to combat the suffering in this world and her own personal pain, creating her most beautiful, most personal works. ”In those dark gloomy days,” an acquaintance from the period reports, ”she radiated energy, wisdom, and cordiality-emotions that seemed to come from another world and had almost been forgotten at the time. ... And she was always drawing. Even while she was preparing supper she would sit at the window and draw, not wanting to waste a single minute.” Friedl threw herself into her painting with the utmost intensity. She painted to combat the suffering in this world and her own personal pain, creating her most beautiful, most personal works. ”In those dark gloomy days,” an acquaintance from the period reports, ”she radiated energy, wisdom, and cordiality-emotions that seemed to come from another world and had almost been forgotten at the time. ... And she was always drawing. Even while she was preparing supper she would sit at the window and draw, not wanting to waste a single minute.”10 On December 9, 1940, Friedl wrote to her friend Hilde Kothny in Germany: ”I have slipped through the net and am gratefully enjoying life. I only hope that if I have to pay for this, I will have stored up enough energy from it to do so.”11 In December 1942 Friedl and Pavel received their transport orders. Composed and prepared for what was in store for her, she started on her way to Theresienstadt.

Helga's diary continues:Wednesday, November 3, 1943Ela cried. I could not at all believe that she's so fond of me and loyal to me and valued our friends.h.i.+p so much. I'm well aware that my friends.h.i.+p with Erika was a disappointment to her. But how should I have known that she and Flaka aren't such close friends, that they only go to their rendezvous together because their boyfriends are pals and that's why they all go for their evening walk together? Flaka and Zajiek have exchanged friends.h.i.+p rings, and now Flaka also has friends.h.i.+p pendants with Hana Lissau and Eva h.e.l.ler. Zajiek has left Flaka, just as Pavla once left Ela and I'm leaving Ela now. Flaka is all alone. Ela is all alone-her friends have betrayed her. Marianne doesn't have a friend, but she gets along well with Ela and Flaka. They're friendly with one another, but haven't offered each other real friends.h.i.+p. I told Ela just now that I'll always think of her as my best friend, even if she no longer wants it that way. I offered her my friends.h.i.+p again, to which she replied that she'd have to think it over seriously. I'm curious how it will turn out doesn't have a friend, but she gets along well with Ela and Flaka. They're friendly with one another, but haven't offered each other real friends.h.i.+p. I told Ela just now that I'll always think of her as my best friend, even if she no longer wants it that way. I offered her my friends.h.i.+p again, to which she replied that she'd have to think it over seriously. I'm curious how it will turn out.We lie packed together like sardines on our triple-decker bunks. Between the stench, the narrow confines, and the vermin, it's really terrible here. I've drawn a sketch of our bed, where two people lie on each level. We sleep in our beds, and live and eat in them like monkeys in a tree or chickens in a henhouse.

November 11, 1943, was a day of fear-a cold, gray, rainy day. The evening before, an order had been given for everyone living in the ghetto to report the following day for a census to be taken two miles from Theresienstadt, in a low area just outside of Bohuovice that the Czechs called kotlina kotlina, the ”hollow.” The order had been preceded by the arrest of the deputy Jewish elder, Jakob Edelstein, and three of his colleagues from the Central Registry, the office a.s.signed to keep a precise record of all arriving and departing transports and an accurate daily count of the population. The arrested men, who vanished into the camp prison in the cellar of the bank building, were accused of falsifying records and abetting the flight of at least fifty-five people.

In fact, it had become the practice among the Central Registry staff to occasionally enter the names of dead persons on transport lists in order to protect some people from being deported to the East. Sometimes births (beginning in 1943, abortions were obligatory)12 were covered up by falsely entering the names of dead persons in the registry. And they attempted to hide the names of people who had fled the camp by listing them in the daily count as still present. were covered up by falsely entering the names of dead persons in the registry. And they attempted to hide the names of people who had fled the camp by listing them in the daily count as still present.

After several prisoners, including Walter Deutsch, had escaped from Theresienstadt that October and were later arrested in Prague, the SS examined the records and, discovering all sorts of irregularities, sent some of those responsible to the camp prison. These events were known only to a small circle, and if the majority of the ghetto residents did learn of them, it was only by way of dubious bonkes bonkes. But there could be no mistake about the meaning of the orders issued for November 11, 1943.

Beds in Room 28-a drawing from Helga's diary Everyone had to get up at five o'clock in the morning and make themselves ready for the march. Soon afterward the ghetto's inhabitants were streaming from its buildings and barracks: between thirty and forty thousand people, from babies to ninety-year-olds, mothers holding their children's hands, some with a baby in a carriage, the sick on crutches, the frail clutching canes or clinging to someone younger. Row upon row, the crowd moved forward, some of them in panic because they feared the worst, others apparently more composed even while they tried to calm themselves with the notion that this was just another absurd n.a.z.i torment that they would have to endure.

”I didn't sleep at all during the night of November 10th,” Helga confided to her diary ten days later, after removing it from its hiding place. ”First came the Home elder, then the doctor, then the nurse-and it was all about the census to be taken in the Bohuovice Hollow. We got up at five, had to put on the warmest clothes we had, and by half past seven we were required to be at the door and ready to march. We stood there for an hour, then we were sent back into the Home, only to be whistled for again ten minutes later and ordered to march back downstairs and line up out on the street. There were three hundred fifty children. Then we walked for forty-five minutes to the hollow. We had enough to eat with us, because that same morning we had been given our ration of three ounces of sugar, a pound of bread, half a tin of liverwurst, and two ounces of margarine. We stood in one spot from ten in the morning until five that evening.”

”We were with the children,” the counselor Eva Weiss recalls. ”And we thought up games to play. Word games or the sort of guessing games you play with children when you don't have anything else, just to divert them and lessen their fear. But the whole time we were afraid they would shoot us. We didn't know if we would be coming back.”

Today, the children who were under her care have no recollection of playing any games in the kotlina kotlina. Only a few of them managed to remember how they formed a little circle, facing outward, so that a friend could go to the toilet. Much stronger are memories of how cold it was, the pain in their frozen hands and feet, and how their legs hurt from standing for hours in one place. And they all share one memory burned forever in their minds-fear.

”I was terribly afraid,” Flaka recalls. ”I thought they were going to shoot us. The whole valley was surrounded by armed police and SS men, with airplanes circling overhead.”

”I wanted to find my mother and grandmother, but that wasn't possible. We weren't allowed to leave our group,” Hanka says. And Handa remembers, ”No one knew why we were there or what was going to happen next. And under those conditions you think of all sorts of possibilities. The worst part of that day for us was that we really didn't know if we would be returning home or what would happen next. We thought we would never return to the camp. It was a trauma for us all.”

In the crowd were Alice Herz-Sommer and her little boy, Stephan, who sometimes played the sparrow in Brundibar Brundibar. She sat on a blanket that she had brought and laid out on the damp, cold ground, with Stephan on one knee and another boy on the other. She told the two boys stories-how else was she to counter their anxiety, how else to make light of their questions of ”why”? Why did they have to stand around here in the rain and cold? Why couldn't they go back to the ghetto? Alice told stories to fight against the increasing tension; she even managed to make the children laugh. And then suddenly came another booming command from the SS: ”Line up in groups of one hundred!” In the distance Anton Burger, the camp commandant, could be seen riding a black horse. A few gliders were drifting overhead, several SS men on bicycles were circling the large area filled with prisoners, Czech policemen held machine guns aimed at the crowd. Dogs were barking, whips cracked. Shots could be heard in the distance. What was happening to those left behind in the ghetto? It was late afternoon, and dusk was falling.

Suddenly the eerie rumor spread that it all might end in a ma.s.s execution by firing squad, or through some other kind of liquidation. Those who had lived in the ghetto since January 1942 recalled in horror the execution of the young men whom the SS made a point of hanging before the eyes of the members of the Council of Elders as punishment for their having tried to smuggle letters out of the camp.13 The camp commandant wanted to set an example that would deter anyone else from disobeying camp rules. Was this so-called census in the Buhoovice Hollow merely a pretense for a.s.sembling everyone in order to murder them? An act of reprisal for some acts of disobedience? An act of revenge taken in the manner of the ma.s.sacre at Lidice? The camp commandant wanted to set an example that would deter anyone else from disobeying camp rules. Was this so-called census in the Buhoovice Hollow merely a pretense for a.s.sembling everyone in order to murder them? An act of reprisal for some acts of disobedience? An act of revenge taken in the manner of the ma.s.sacre at Lidice?

The Germans were capable of anything. For those who were older, November 11 was a date that awakened the ghosts of the past. In Berlin on November 9, 1918, the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann had proclaimed Germany a republic. And November 11, 1918, marked the signing of the armistice agreement that later led to the Treaty of Versailles, which in the eyes of the n.a.z.is had brought ”disgrace and shame on Germany for all time.” Ever since the early 1920s, these dates had been thorns in the side of all enemies of the Weimar Republic, especially Adolf Hitler and his n.a.z.i Party, which was why they had repeatedly unleashed their hatred and thirst for power on their anniversaries. Their failed putsch in Munich occurred on November 9, 1923. And Kristallnacht-the pogroms unleashed against Jews throughout the German Reich, which by then included the Sudetenland-began on the night of November 9, 1938. The events of that night now lay five years in the past. But for those standing in the Buhoovice Hollow, those events were once again real and menacing.

”So I picked my boy up and held him tight, even though that was rather difficult,” Alice Herz-Sommer continues in her report. ”And now the moment was here. We are going to be shot. This is the end. Life is over. Yes, and how does a person react in such a situation? One does not react at all. There is no way to react. Your own emotional life is no longer functional. It is more like a dark wall. Everything is black. The only thing I could feel was the warm body of my son. And I told myself, Well, he's here with me. Whatever happens to me happens to him. And that lies in G.o.d's hand.”14 As the day drew to a close, people-especially the elderly-began falling to the ground in exhaustion, some of them fainting, others still quite conscious and yet incapable of staying on their feet. Many younger people were barely able to hold out, either, and-without arousing the notice of the police or SS men who were pacing along their ranks and bellowing numbers-they took turns slipping to the back of their groups of one hundred, where they could crouch down and relax their exhausted bodies for a few minutes. Several more hours pa.s.sed. It was growing dark and still they were being held in check. When would this nightmare end?

Little Frta, Marta Frohlich, was ill with bronchitis and in the infirmary in the Hohenelbe Barracks, so she did not have to appear for the census in the kotlina kotlina, as was the case with several hundred other patients. Many of them, especially the old and frail, had been brought to the hospital early that morning. The hospital was overcrowded, and there was so little room that even those who were seriously ill not only had to share a cot with others, but many of them could not even stretch out and had to sit up. There they huddled, shoulder to shoulder, the entire day. Including Marta: ”Sick as I was, I sat on my cot from morning to night. I couldn't even go to the toilet. They just kept counting us over and over-like cows. I heard airplanes and I heard shots, and I thought we would all be shot.”

As the hours pa.s.sed, her feverish thoughts were with her brothers and sisters in the kotlina kotlina. It seemed like an eternity. ”What are the Germans up to? If only I could be with my brothers and sisters! If they shoot them, then I want to be shot, too.”

”And then something happened that I will never forget,” Alice Herz-Sommer recalls. ”A loud cry, in Czech: 'Zpt do ghetta! 'Zpt do ghetta! Back to the ghetto!' There's no describing the feeling. The ghetto had become paradise. The ghetto, that indescribable ghetto, that h.e.l.l-in that moment it became paradise!” Back to the ghetto!' There's no describing the feeling. The ghetto had become paradise. The ghetto, that indescribable ghetto, that h.e.l.l-in that moment it became paradise!”

Zdenk Ohrenstein, the boy from Prague who had played the dog in Brundibar Brundibar (and who later went by Ornest, the Czech version of his surname), described these events in an article for (and who later went by Ornest, the Czech version of his surname), described these events in an article for Vedem: Vedem: ”A great rush, as if a rope had slackened and everything gave way. People moved forward. No one knew who had given the order, but everyone started to walk. Like a slowly churning-and deadly-avalanche. Pus.h.i.+ng and shoving. Loud cries. People ruthlessly trampling each other. Everyone just thinking of himself. Me, n.o.body else! My life is at stake. We rolled back to the barracks, which then stood in our way. This horde of people became one great mob. You couldn't breathe, and everything stood still. Each was carried along, scarcely aware even of himself. The strength and force of the individual no longer counted. There was only one awful force, the force of the mob, unstoppable and cruel. Yes, so it was-and yet we managed to get home. No one knows precisely how. Everyone fled, leaving everyone else behind. We escaped like flies from a spider-web, our faces expressing only bafflement.” ”A great rush, as if a rope had slackened and everything gave way. People moved forward. No one knew who had given the order, but everyone started to walk. Like a slowly churning-and deadly-avalanche. Pus.h.i.+ng and shoving. Loud cries. People ruthlessly trampling each other. Everyone just thinking of himself. Me, n.o.body else! My life is at stake. We rolled back to the barracks, which then stood in our way. This horde of people became one great mob. You couldn't breathe, and everything stood still. Each was carried along, scarcely aware even of himself. The strength and force of the individual no longer counted. There was only one awful force, the force of the mob, unstoppable and cruel. Yes, so it was-and yet we managed to get home. No one knows precisely how. Everyone fled, leaving everyone else behind. We escaped like flies from a spider-web, our faces expressing only bafflement.”

At nine o'clock the girls reached their Home. Flaka had fainted from exhaustion on the way back and had to be carried for a while. But that was harmless in comparison to those who were so old and weak that they did not survive this day of absurd census taking, or who later died from its rigors.