This sketch was drawn by prominent Czech artist inmate of Theresienstadt Leo Haas. He was a member of the Zeichenstube (drawing room), which was assigned as their specific task to provide illustrations for the daily stats submitted to the camp commander's office from the central internal/Jewish administration offices. According to Theresienstadt survivor Charlotte Opfermann, "This was a cushy job, while the rest of us slaved in the fields for area farmers or in the mica factory, and did other hard work. These people had pens and paper for this work. The rest of us didn't even have toilet paper". Charlotte Opfermann appears to be the only one of the few Theresienstadt prisoners who came into contact with these children and who survived the Holocaust.

She explains,

"This sketch shows an almost photographic presentation of inmates (behind barred windows) watching with fearful trepidaton) as the Bialystok children were marched past our barracks in the middle of the night, on their way to the bath house. All prisoners were inside/indoors at the time, because it was 'lights out' at 8PM and curfew time. But word had gotten out in some limited way, and many people (prisoners) knew that something unusual was planned for these newly arrived children. This sketch conveys the sense of forboding that we all felt . . . even those of my colleagues who volunteered to take care of the children in an ongoing manner at the Kreta outpost (a farmstead outside of the ramparts of the Large Fortress) had some delusions, created by the administration's recruiting pitch that 'these children would be sent to Switzerland or to Palestine with the doctors, nurses and caregivers'. I did not trust or believe this pitch then, but some of my colleagues did. One lady of my acquaintance voluteered for this job, leaving her own children behind in the camp."

Some time in the second half of August 1943, my bosses at the Magdeburger Kaserne women’s Arbeitseinsatz (work assignment) office suggested that I take on a one-time night-time assignment at the nearby Entwesung, the camp’s delousing center. This installation was close to the Zentralbad, the 'public-communal baths'. Here mattresses, blankets and such were cleaned (most often for prominent prisoners who enjoyed these and other special privileges) by special arrangement with the building elders, in an effort to control the spread of vermin. I was told that the work would be easy to do, that I was a logical worker for this special job, inasmuch as I was well acquainted with the operation of the showers at the Zentralbad nearby. The late night-time schedule was an unusual arrangement, well after the strictly enforced official curfew. It required a special pass from the Arbeitseinsatz administrators, so that the Ghettowachmann (Jewish prisoner camp guard) at the main gate of the Hamburger Kaserne would permit me to exit and return again after work.

 

I was told that a newly arrived transport of approximately a thousand children from Poland was to be processed. The night-time schedule did not seem too unusual, because the bathing schedule at the Zentralbad for the regular Theresienstadt camp inmates was always fixed many months in advance and fully booked well ahead of time. So this extra-curricular schedule made sense.

 

I was quite excited to be a part of this special intake procedure, anxious to see the strange Polish children. It was a treat and a privilege to have been asked, a break in my dreary daily routine. The last time I had known any Polish children was before the deportation of the Ostjuden from Germany on 10-27-1938, five years ago. And I had grown older and wiser since then. Much had happened in the meantime. There was so much that I wanted to ask them, depending on their ages, about their life and past experiences. It would be an adventure, an opportunity to learn new things myself about them, about their lives, about their experiences. Maybe there was a chance that I would encounter one or the other of the Ostjuden girlfriends from Wiesbaden who had been deported there in 1938, although I realized that this would be too much to ask in the way of possible coincidence.

 

In the course of this work, I could explain to the new arrivals what lay ahead for them in Theresienstadt, the way more established and knowledgeable prisoners had helped me find my way into life here when I first arrived a few weeks ago. I also liked the idea that I would be offering a needed service to the new arrivals, something that was an important part in my family’s ethos of helping and serving our fellow men, similar to the work as luggage carrier and transport helper which I had been doing for years in Germany for the many departing transports to Poland and to Theresienstadt. That was before we realized that most if not all luggage was being taken (i.e. onfiscated/stolen) from the transported Jews, and that our hard and dedicated labor of love was all in vain.

 

I felt quite important for having been chosen for this assignment and went to the Entwesungs-shower installation at the appointed time. About two hundred children were already in the changing area when I arrived. They were quite young, about two, three and four years old. From what I could see, the ones we were to work with first (others were being brought in later) were ‘pre-schoolers’ -- tho none of them had ever been to any school, and never would see such an institution for the remainder of their lives . My co-workers Lily Fleischer and one or two other members of the elite Prague and Brno Zionist youth organisers were already hard at work and informed me that a total of 1200 or more children were involved in this transport.[There actually were 1264] That was about par for the course. Most transports from Germany to Poland and to Theresienstadt (and from there ‘East’) were organised in groups of a thousand at any given time.

 

It was no great surprise that none of the children spoke German. This was a problem as I tried to communicate with them, inasmuch as my knowledge of Czech, Polish and Yiddish was sketchy, to say the least. By this time I had been in the camp long enough to know from experience that German was not a language of choice or preference among the prisoners - my friends among the camp inmates from Czechoslovakia had made it painfully clear early on: German is the ‘hated language of the oppressors’. By now, I had been interned here long enough to fully appreciated and share this perception. That’s why I tried my darndest to learn Czech almost from the first day on, as soon as I was brought into the camp.

 

All the children seemed to speak Yiddish and Polish fluently, as far as I could tell. But they were not eager to communicate with anyone outside of their own group. It was quite difficult to get them ready for the shower, as they would not part with their clothes. They resisted undressing with all their might, were clearly fearful of losing their clothes. They cried bitter tears and tried to hide. My instructions were to get rid of all their clothing. I was not sure whether their old clothes were supposed to be washed and disinfected, or whether the plan was to throw them away. Maybe that decision was made later, I no longer remember this detail. As a rule, we threw very little of anything away, ever. We had so little to spare. But these children’s clothes were incredibly dirty, torn, and ragged. The little ones had been en route, travelling, for days. And they had lived in the Bialystok Ghetto for a long time before they were brought to Theresienstadt. They were quite aware of the fact that clothes were important, had to be treasured and guarded, because it would be difficult or impossible to replace them. And they had no experience with getting new clothes, did not know how to deal with such an opportunity. Their hair and their little bodies were very dirty and they did not trust us. We were strangers. And their clothes were filthy, but they were a part of their past and they were trying to hold on to anything that was familiar.

 

Our first order of the day [or night] was to treat them kindly. Obviously, we had to win their trust and confidence at all cost. Then we walked them in small groups into the shower room and assisted them with washing their skinny little bodies under the wonderful warm running water. Eventually, they did relax a little, and after a while they acted almost like what we would now consider normal children. I showed them a trick ‘our’ children used when trying to make shoes ‘fit’: we would break down the cap which went over the heel. This made it possible that almost anyone could wear almost any pair of shoes, because there suddenly was no limiting given size range. The children in the youth barracks in Theresienstadt had been doing this all along. Very few ‘owned’ any clothes in the normal sense. Everything was shared. Communal property. And, since age groups lived together in most cases, there was a sense of ‘community ownership’ where clothes were concerned. I was sure these new arrivals would soon follow the same system.

 

Quite a few of the Bialystok children were barefoot, and they now suddenly had shoes given to them. This was a big treat. It was a big leap for them and they had great difficulties making the transition: going from fearing for their lives while experiencing the horror of the Jewish uprising in the Ghetto Bialystok, enduring the sufferng of the train ride to Theresienstadt. And then they were asked to give up their clothes, the only possession they had. When this experience was followed by selecting ‘new’ [or newer than what they had] clothes, they did not know what to make of things.

 

We caregivers had received a generous supply of ‘new’ clothes for these new arrivals from the Kleiderkammer, the place where clothing that had been confiscated from incoming transports was sorted, searched for hidden valuables, and then shipped to Germany for distribution by the NS Volkswohlfahrt (the party welfare organisation). Getting clothes for this evening’s intake of new prisoners was a most unusual arrangement. That fact alone should have tipped us off that there was something unusual about this incoming transport. Knowing that these ‘new’ clothes had been taken from other children who were -most likely- dead at this time was a very disconcerting experience for us adults as well. We tried not to think of the true, absent owners. And we were puzzled by this generous allocation. It should have indicated to us that there were special plans afoot for these children. But we did not have the ability, then, to analyze and try to interpret such signals, nor did we have the detachment and the perspective to see each event in its proper context, as I can do now. At the time, it seemed that these children would follow the ‘usual’ intake procedure: that they would be assigned quarters inside the ghetto and, eventually, be redeported ‘East’. In the meantime, we were happy to know that they had some clothes and some special care, for now.

 

For the moment, we were grateful to have been given clothes for the new arrivals and to have a chance to wash and care for them. It was far better that these nice, clean children’s clothes should be enjoyed by these new arrivals to the camp. Looking back now from the perspective of my own post-World-War-Two life of freedom, it is an eery sensation as I try re-living these times. My own children, born long after the War was over, used to love buying and getting new clothes. They would fuss and preen in front of a store mirror, trying on many different styles and happily chatter about when and where they would wear these treasured new acquisitions.

 

I left the delousing station towards morning, because I had to go to my regular job as well. Lilly Fleischer and the others finished up the work that needed doing with the children. I was exhausted. I am sure that they were, also. But the work needed to be done. The children were slowly trying to adjust to the new surroundings and seemed to accept their new situation rather well, eventually. And Lilly Fleischer enjoyed a special status of semi-prominence as Bobby Fleischer's wife. She could allocate her time and workplace, a privilege which I did not enjoy.

 

However, the Polish children were not integrated into the camp community at all. I soon learned that they were installed outside of the camp, beyond the ramparts at the Westbarracken. The next day, word got out that volunteer care givers, doctors, nurses and other helpers were now being sought to continue taking charge of these children. One of my strawmat neighbors on the attic of the Hamburger Kaserne was a young girl from Breslau. She had arrived in the camp a day or so before we came, in early June 1943. Prior to their deportation, her mother had been an office worker in the Breslau Jewish Community administrative office. The girl was a nurse by profession. Being of approximately the same age, we had become quite friendly. Several times, she worked in of the same hard labor detail as I did. She was hoping to find a nursing assignment eventually.

 

When I returned from work that evening, the nurse from Breslau was wearing her blue, grey and white uniform with a large white wrap-around apron. She wore a stiffly starched nurses’ cap on her head. She had also packed her suitcase and her blanket was rolled up. Clearly she was ready to leave, tearfully bidding her mother good bye. At first I thought that she had found a better housing arrangement, perhaps in one of the rooms downstairs - with a real cot to sleep on. But then the two women explained to me that she had volunteered to help with the Polish children on a permanent basis. Mother and daughter were both sobbing. I felt especially sorry for the mother, because she had just lost her best friend a few days ago: This friend had committed suicide during the night while all of us were sleeping next to her. We were all very unhappy, but had not realized how totally despondent this woman was. The mother’s boyfriend from Breslau was there also. He had come to the camp with them, had been a clerical worker at the Breslau Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland office, lived at the Hannover Kaserne attic near my father and brother, and had just been appointed a member of the Ghetto police. We were quite impressed with his rapid career path.

 

Amid pitiful sobs, the daughter assured her mother: “If there is a chance to come back, I will do that. If there is a chance that I can claim you to accompany me when we’re sent to Switzerland or Palestine, I shall do that. I hope you know that I love you.”The mother sobbed and silently hugged the young girl.The boyfriend in his improvised ghetto-Wachmann-uniform hugged both of them: “If there is ever a ghetto guard assignment available at the Westbaracken, I shall try to get this job. That way I could bring messages back and forth between you two.” He seemed to fill a father-substitute function in their family constelllation. Then the nurse left for her new assignment at the Westbarracken, to care there for the Bialystok children.

 

It seemed to me that she had made a good decision, though it was a painful one for her and her mother. The volunteer workers had been told that the children and their care givers would be sent to Switzerland or to Palestine at a later date. That seemed like a wonderful opportunity to gain freedom, to escape from this hell. But some of us feared that it might possibly be just a ruse to get people to volunteer for these jobs. I asked myself whether I would have volunteered, if I had nurses’ training. I did not have such training or experience and could not imagine leaving my mother behind. That seemed -to me- wrong. I was very sad for the mother who was now left behind all by herself. The nurse promised that she would come outside of the barracks door every evening at six o’clock sharp, whenever possible, and look for her mother who promised that she would, at that same time, try to wave to her from atop the Bastei, a special area on top of the South ramparts. In the coming weeks, I went with the Breslau mother to the Bastei several times and, together, we waved at her daughter from afar. We could barely make out her figure with the white apron, far away at the Westbaracken area.

 

A few weeks later, we learned that the entire group --children and caregivers-- had been deported 'East', though there was no clear understanding where they had been sent. I learned, after the War was over, that Adolf Eichmann had tried to use this group in a barter deal, hoping to obtain trucks for the Wehrmacht in exchange. When the negotiations led nowhere, the entire group was sent to Auschwitz and killed.

© fr. ' Ides of November', Charlotte Opfermann 2000

 

Charlotte Guthmann Opfermann passed away on November 22, 2004 after a brief illness. Click here for an online memorial.