The following morning, on 21 April 1942, Marie reported at the assembly centre in Holešovice, a part of Prague. She spent three days and nights going through all the procedures and harassment together with a thousand other deportees. On 24 April, they were sent by train (transport Am) to the Bohušovice station, about 65 km north of Prague, and then made to walk about thirty minutes to Theresienstadt. Marie had spent months preparing for the trip and life in the ghetto, and planned to bring extra food items for Irene and Gustav.
Marie hoped that once in the ghetto she would be reunited with, or at least see, her sister and brother-in-law, but she arrived in Theresienstadt at a very difficult time. The people of the ghetto, which was created only five months before, were already suffering from deportations to the east. Shortly before Marie’s arrival, the ghetto commandant, SS Obersturmführer Siegfried Seidl, had ordered four additional transports to occupied Poland in less than a week, each with a thousand deportees. Facing the difficult task of compiling the deportation lists, the ghetto administration decided to include a large number of people who had only recently entered the gates of this fortress town. Only protected prisoners, important workers, people over the age of 65 (later over 67), and other minor groups, such as World War I veterans or those with foreign citizenship, were exempted.i H. G. Adler, estimated that 6,000 prisoners for the transports had to be selected from the pool of 10,700 people not protected by the current ghetto rules.ii
Marie, in her fifties, widowed and without any contacts in the ghetto administration, was immediately selected for the next transport departing in three days. She spent the time in the ghetto in the so-called Schleuse (sluice), in the Aussig barracks, the place where the arriving as well as departing prisoners gathered. Here she may have met Gustav and Irene, who were selected for the transport scheduled to depart only one day after Marie, though in the chaos that accompanied the massive wave of deportations, most of the prisoners in the ghetto did not even go through the Sluice on the way to the deportation train. Some of them were informed about the deportation only several hours before the train departed.iii In any case, Marie could not share with them the food she had amassed, because the Germans had already confiscated almost all the luggage of the deportees while still in Prague. Did her sister and brother-in-law volunteer for the transport when they found out that Marie would not be staying in the ghetto with the hope they would be reunited in the east? The fact the Gustav would soon turn 67 and was not among the prime candidates for the transports offers this possibility, but we will never know.
On 27 April, Marie departed from Bohušovice. Her train first travelled further north to Dresden, before taking a sharp turn eastwards in the direction of Breslau, Łódź and Lublin, until finally, after more than three days, it pulled up at the small train station in Izbica in the Lublin ‘Reservation’ (transport Aq).1 The train with Irene and Gustav took the prisoners to Zamość, some 20 km south of Izbica. Marie and Irene never saw each other again. The deportees had experienced years of persecution, but even those who had spent months in Theresienstadt could not have been prepared for the conditions that in the spring of 1942 ruled in eastern Poland, a territory that had already become the epicentre of the ‘Final Solution’.
Photo 19 Izbica (Courtesy of the Holocaust Historical Society).
Before the war, Izbica was a small town, with an almost exclusively Jewish population (92 per cent). The Germans turned Izbica into a Jewish town (Judenstadt). In a valley, encircled by hills from three sides and by the river Wieprz from the fourth, Izbica was completely isolated from the surrounding territories and the Germans did not have to build walls or fences around the settlement. There were only six water pumps and few latrines in the town.iv In March 1942, the Germans turned Izbica into a transit ghetto and temporary holding centre for the Jews deported from Germany, Austria, the Protectorate and Slovakia, before they murdered them in the nearby extermination camps. Between 16,000 and 18,000 Jews deported from central Europe were temporarily held in the town. Robert Kuwalek has concluded that ‘Izbica was a kind of collection point [Umschlagplatz] on the Lublin–Bełżec line, at which, in short, they were supposed to wait for the death train’.v
Soon after the arrival of the first transports from central Europe the Germans sent the majority of the local Polish Jews to the Bełżec extermination camp and Czech and German Jews were moved into their houses. The deportees, accustomed to middle-class life in major central European cities, were truly shocked by the living conditions in Izbica, a poor place that had already suffered for more than two years under brutal German occupation. We have only a very limited number of sources that would allow us partly to enter the minds of the deportees, among them Marie, because not more than 13 deportees of the more than 3,000 people sent from Theresienstadt to Izbica survived the war. One survivor recalled her and her fellow victims’ first impressions after arriving in the town:
then they stuffed us into one house, about thirty of us in one room, whose windows were papered over. We could barely breathe, nor could we even sit down there, because we were packed in so tightly that we were actually standing all day and all night. I wanted to open a window at least, because we could not breathe, but as I was peeling off the paper, there were so many bedbugs there that I quickly stuck it back on. And then, about two days later, they divided us up into those little houses, because most of the Polish Jews had already been cleared out somewhere.vi
People slept on the earthen floor, often more than twenty people in one small room. The people whom Marie arrived with had no suitcases or even food. Their last personal items, in a special carriage of the train, were confiscated en route. Those who had successfully smuggled in money or valuables could, at the risk of the death penalty, buy things at the exorbitant prices of the thriving black market, but others starved or were forced to sell extra items of clothes they wore. Ida Hermannová and her family, who had travelled in the same train as Marie, first from Prague and then from Theresienstadt, described the living conditions in a letter they managed to send clandestinely back to the Protectorate:
We are, literally, barely scraping by. We live here, like the others, several families in one room. We lie on the ground. Our parents, thank God, were lent a straw mattress by a very nice woman who lives with us. We cover ourselves with our coats. Meanwhile we live in the constant fear that they will send us on, as has already happened several times, just like that. One can get everything here, but you have to pay a lot of money. […] We are selling everything, the last clothes we are wearing, to be able to buy the absolute essentials. All of us have to work hard all day long, but without pay. We breathe mountain air here, about 800m high, and we would all devour, not eat, food, and are forced to prevent little Eva from eating as much as she would like. […] We beg you to send us packages as often as possible, mainly sugar, roux, artificial honey, groats, millet. […] hunger is painful. Please send us as well head scarves, stockings, an apron, everything in bright colours. […] Please do not let us die of hunger. Send us whatever you can. […] People here are covered in rashes from being undernourished. The women do not have their periods. In a word, it is horrible here. The houses here do not resemble even our cottages. They are much, much worse, full of bedbugs and fleas. There is also a louse here that carries typhus. Thank God we have, by keeping clean, so far protected ourselves against that. […] Don’t be cross with us; you know well that I have never wanted anything from anybody, but hunger is very painful, and you wouldn’t even recognize any of us because we are so thin.vii
From Marie’s transport, men were already selected in Lublin to do forced labour and sent to the Majdanek concentration camp. Mostly only women, children and the elderly arrived in Izbica. The deportees lived in the small town for several months before many succumbed to hunger, typhus or exhaustion. Others were sent to the Bełżec or Sobibór extermination camps during one or other of the ‘Aktions’ organized by the Germans and their Ukrainian and Polish helpers. Marie’s fate is unknown. The fate of the deportees to Zamość, among them Irene and Gustav, was similar. Almost nobody survived. The Sternschuss family received the last message from either Marie or Irene in July 1942.
Marie’s ultimate destination is not known (nor is that of Irene and Gustav). After the war, Hella Cougno wrote to Grete Reichl that, when she was working in the camp administration in Auschwitz, she saw Marie’s name on a Sonderbehandlung (‘special treatment’) list, which indicated she had already been killed there. This is, however, unlikely, because the prisoners of the Izbica ghetto either died in the town, or were sent to one of the death camps in the region, to Bełżec or Sobibór.
Ernst had no information about Marie’s fate after she left Prague. One wonders what he thought. In her memoir, his granddaughter Erika writes that Ernst ‘intelligent, kindly but so very innocent’ still believed in the German people as cultured and civilized, incapable – apart from a few rotten apples – of committing the cruelties and atrocities they were accused of. Did he think Marie was alive but not allowed to write or send messages? We can surmise that intellectually he may well have guessed her fate. We shall never know. Ernst continued to live with the Cougno family in Thessaloniki until March 1943, when, after a short ghettoization, the Germans quickly organized deportations of the whole Jewish community to the concentration and extermination camps in occupied Poland. Salvator, Hella, Erika and Heinz were sent to Auschwitz in the first train that left Thessaloniki. They all miraculously survived thanks to their being fluent in German, which allowed them to take administrative positions in the prisoner hierarchy. Ernst was living in hiding with a Bulgarian family at that time and had a good chance of surviving the war. Erika learnt about his fate after the war:
Grandfather still believed in the German people. He felt so lonely away from his family that one Sunday morning he took all the decorations he had earned as a Captain during the First World War, along with his diploma and went to the Gestapo. Extremely politely […] the SS received him and asked who he was and what he wanted. […] ‘To be sent to where my daughter and her family went.’ The SS-officer put a junior officer in charge, instructing him, ‘Please lead Dr Ernst Loevy to the station. From there in a few days he will have the opportunity to join his daughter.’viii
Ernst was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and was immediately sent to the gas chambers.
1Lublin Reservation was a territory created by the Nazis in occupied eastern Poland in late 1939, which was supposed to become the settlement for all European Jews. The plan was shelved relatively quickly, but the term was still in use even later.