THERESIENSTADT/TEREZÍN

“I’m getting déjà vu,” says Helga. I’m standing in a quiet courtyard with her and her sister, Liese. Weeds sprout up between the slabs of concrete paving the ground. One side of the courtyard is bordered by a wall and a few parked cars, some quite damaged. A gray, two-story building looms on the other side. Its facade forms a semicircle and has large, barred windows.

Helga points to the top floor, the attic of Theresienstadt’s Sudeten barracks, where she, her mother, and her sister were bunked after arrival. Compared to earlier transports, the group they arrived with was small. Two days prior, on March 30, 1943, together with ninety-eight others, they had boarded an old passenger train with wooden benches at Vienna’s northwestern station, transport number IV/14f. My great-grandmother Hertha had removed the whalebones from her bodice and sewn her remaining money into their place. Their luggage included a wash basin and portable bidet. Six-year-old Liese, still feverish, had spent the journey lying on the netted luggage rack. Hertha and Helga walked the mile and a half from the train station in Bohušovice to Theresienstadt; they pulled Liese along on a cart.

The departure filled Helga with curiosity—she tells me she didn’t feel any fear. So many friends and acquaintances had already been sent off. By then, only about eight thousand Jews were still living in Vienna, most protected by Aryan spouses or parents. Nobody, she says, could even imagine that going to Riga or Minsk meant death.

In Theresienstadt, people slept two to each straw mattress on the narrow, three-story bunks. The latrines and washrooms were on the ground floor, explains Helga. Liese nods. She had a chamber pot she’d carry to the latrines before using them. She’d just turn her back to the other women, as her mother had told her was only fitting.

I ask them if the latrines were in the courtyard where there’s now a garage, or inside the building. They are not sure and debate the various possibilities as if they were discussing some cherished place where they used to reside. I’m amazed at the pleasure they take in recognizing certain details, like the church we passed as we walked across the old market square and the barracks’ striking rounded windows. One says something that contradicts the other, and they go back and forth until one of them gives in, whereupon the second admits that the first just might be right after all. Are they indulging in some fundamental human need to fill the gaps in their memory, no matter how painful? Or has their memory of this place stopped hurting?

We visit the northern Czech town of Terezín together in August 2013, more than seventy years after their arrival in Theresienstadt. The sisters were thrilled when I asked whether they would accompany me on a work trip there, doing reportage for a German magazine. I had completed my master’s degree in New York a few months before and was on an internship in Berlin. Afterward, I went back to New York again for work, and stayed almost two years before ultimately returning to Vienna.

An editor at the German magazine pitched me the assignment, and I accepted without hesitation. I’d begun realizing how much my relationship to my family history had changed since I’d left Vienna. I can’t remember a time when I knew nothing about the Holocaust. As a six-year-old, I eyed the showers in a Salzburg ski hotel with suspicion. I had heard that relatives had been murdered by “camouflaged showers.” How could I be sure we wouldn’t suffer the same fate here? Later, I devoured every children’s and young-adult book on the topic with—indeed—a comforting degree of fright. As I grew older and began to grasp the sheer monstrosity of those crimes, I often awoke in the middle of nightmares where I was running from Nazis or saw my family disappear into gas chambers. Then I stopped dealing with the topic altogether, which nobody really noticed, because people often reacted helplessly when I told them I was Jewish. What did that mean? Was I different? Were they somehow complicit? Nobody seemed to know what to say, so instead they stayed silent. Which was fine with me. I was never very religious, so I acted as if the persecution of the Jews didn’t particularly interest me. But the real reason was different: it hurt to know that my nightmares had been my ancestors’ reality.

When I went to England for my undergraduate studies, I was able to get a little distance. Some people asked how I could live in Austria: wasn’t it just full of Nazis? I felt attacked. I—who as a teen had painted anarchy signs everywhere, read The Communist Manifesto to my classmates (interpreting their awkward silence as emotion), and always insisted I didn’t feel especially Austrian—started to defend Austria. Yes, there was a right-wing party that worried me, but the country wasn’t just a bunch of Nazis. Yes, they’d taken their time with restitution, but that’s just Austrians’ easygoing nature. And so on.

But it was only in New York that I really began to feel like a historical anomaly—and realized I had to deal with the past if I wanted to understand why my grandparents stayed in Vienna.

*

We stroll across the deserted main square of Terezín. There’s hardly anyone in sight—just a beggar asking for change. The sisters look at each other. “Give him something, Helga,” Liese says, as the man comes toward us, hands cupped in front of his chest, his face worn, his clothing ragged. Helga fishes a coin out of her backpack. “It feels great to give someone in Theresienstadt a euro,” says Liese. Like her older sister, she’s in a good mood. We stayed the night in Prague and enjoyed dessert at a cafe the previous evening. One of my cousins has also come along, so it feels a bit like a family outing.

Today, Terezín has three thousand inhabitants. A small museum and a few plaques recall its past. Outside the city walls stands the former Small Fortress, which the Nazis turned into a prison for resistance fighters, now a memorial. Theresienstadt was built in 1780 as a garrison town to protect the Habsburg empire against attacks from the north and west. When the first Czechoslovak republic was established after the end of World War I, the town was renamed Terezín. After the Nazis invaded, it got its German name back, the local population was expelled, and at the end of 1941, a group of Czech Jews was brought in to build a camp they governed themselves. Some wanted to believe it was a ghetto for the privileged and old, who would be well taken care of until the end of their lives. In reality, from the very beginning, it was intended to be a transit camp, sending Jews to the East and annihilation.

To either side of the church, which remained closed throughout the Nazi occupation, stand yellow, two-story buildings with high windows—former children’s dorms. Clearly the buildings were once meant to impress; today they look neglected. Plaster is crumbling from the walls, and the street nearby is full of potholes. I look at the map. When it was an active ghetto, the building on the left was designated L414, the youth dorm; the one on the right, L410, the girls’ dorm; L410 housed Czech children. Helga looks around. “Does that ring a bell?” Liese asks. “I think so, yes,” she says, answering her own question. But she sounds uncertain. Helga remembers being in L414 but feels the building on the right, L410, seems more familiar. The door is unlocked, so we go inside. The ceilings are high. There are cobwebs all over, pigeon droppings on the floor, and filth everywhere. As I climb the steps, the floor creaks in front of a door. Someone has posted a missing dog flyer in the window. Helga recognizes the staircase and window and seems chipper again, but I find the place oppressive. Its current state isn’t a worthy memorial to the thousands of children who stayed here, most of whom never returned home, I think—even though it was likely in a similar condition back then. But I can’t quite decide what I’d prefer instead: a beautiful renovation would be inappropriate too. If it were torn down, the connection to those children would be erased. Should these buildings be turned into a museum, and the town itself transformed into one massive memorial?

After her arrival, Helga spent a few weeks in room 18 of building L414. It was an improvement over the Sudeten barracks. Here, eighteen girls of the same age slept in a room and there was an older girl who oversaw the room, as well as older Jewish detainees who looked after them and established a regular daily routine. One of the tasks of the girl who oversaw the room was to manage the bread rations received once every three days from the camp administration. The caretakers—young Austrian and German Jews, many of whom had previously been involved in Zionist movements—had managed to give the girls a sense of community, such that the roommates stuck together and didn’t steal from each other. So it caused quite a stir one day when a piece of bread went missing. Helga had been alone in the room a short while before, and she came under suspicion. Everyone from room 18 gathered and Helga was questioned. She asserted her innocence, insisting that the other girls’ alibis be checked as well. Indeed, another girl confessed to the theft.

“You know me, I wouldn’t do such a thing,” Helga adds. I nod. Still, I’m unsure. Do I really know her so well that I could confirm it? Helga was always hungry in Theresienstadt. The physical condition of hunger, where you’re always thinking of food and constantly looking for leftovers or the next scrap that falls to the floor, is something I’ve never experienced to that extent. Only once, when I was at an adventure camp at the age of eighteen and got only one meal a day, did I feel how overwhelmingly present the mere idea of food could become. Instead of debating life’s great questions, campers shared descriptions of their favorite foods. And we knew it was just a five-day challenge. What can constant hunger do to a person? Would I have stolen the bread?

Hunger determined Helga’s every decision. Like all reasonably healthy people in Theresienstadt, she was assigned work. The various workshops mainly provided goods and services needed within the camp, but some worked for external clients, including the Wehrmacht. Helga started in the ceramics workshop. When she learned extra food rations were available for those doing heavy labor, she reported to the sawmill. She found the lumber hard to carry, so she asked for a transfer. Work in the mica factory, where laborers had to use a special spatula to split apart large sheets of phyllosilicate, was exhausting as well as damaging to the eyes and respiratory tract, so that was no better. Helga was transferred again, to a cleaning crew responsible for the corridors and steps in the so-called Cavaliers’ barracks, the camp’s sick ward. It was horrible, she says. That’s a strong word for Helga, and she doesn’t use it lightly, so I press her: why? “Because I was all alone.”

I don’t understand her answer until she tells me how, in the summer of 1943, she was finally assigned to work the camp’s vast farm. In addition to supplying Theresienstadt— and its nearly 30,000 imprisoned Jews—it also fed the SS commandant’s office, the Czech security guards, and the surrounding hamlets. Helga worked the fields outside the city wall alongside a group of about twenty teenagers. She wore a heavy-duty work uniform with many pockets, and leaky rubber boots she’d stuff with newspaper. The fields were muddy, and her feet were constantly wet. During the wintertime she put all her clothes on underneath her overalls but froze anyway. The work was hard, but Helga felt it was useful because the group shared a common goal: after the war, they would all emigrate to Palestine and build a Jewish state. So it was good they were learning to farm.

When the guards weren’t looking, the field workers ate whatever was even remotely edible. Apples, onions, beets, corn on the cob. “We must’ve had iron-clad stomachs,” says Helga. After the apple harvest, they secretly buried a full box for winter storage, marking the spot with stones. But months later, when they went to dig it up, they couldn’t find any trace of it. They dug everywhere but found nothing.

It was easier to smuggle things back into camp at the end of each day. Helga used rags to tether turnips to her thighs and stuffed her brassiere with apples. Someone was sent ahead to check out who was guarding the gate. If it was a woman, she’d be allowed to pat down female inmates, and Helga would stealthily let the fruits and vegetables roll out from under her clothes. The memory amuses her to this day.

Helga would probably never have taken food from another person, she explains, but she considered stealing food from the field acceptable. For one thing, it was just a tiny bit from a huge supply, of which the camp overseers got much more than they ever did. What’s more, she honored her own personal rule of not keeping anything she smuggled into the camp for herself. She had eaten in the field, and the fruits and vegetables she and her fellow field workers smuggled in were divided evenly among them, so Helga gave her portion to her mother and sister.

Hertha also had to work. Ten hours a day, with one free day a week. She cared for the ill, especially children, while her own little daughter was back in the attic of the Sudeten barracks. In theory, four- to ten-year-olds were assigned to children’s dorms—but by then they were hopelessly overcrowded.

Liese, then seven, could neither read nor write; after all, she’d never attended school. Nor did she have any toys. So she played with anything and everything that fell into her hands—like the packet of sugar her mother had hidden in her bunk. She took it, shook it back and forth, and listened to the soft swishing sound. Then she tore the brown paper open, stuck a finger in, and stirred it. When she pulled her finger out, a few crystals clung to it. She licked them off. When she tried to plunge her finger back into the sugar, the packet fell from her hand, and its fine grains scattered across the filthy floor. This startled her, and she couldn’t get the sugar back into the packet.

A few evenings later, Hertha caught her daughter with a new toy. Liese had discovered matches and stared, entranced, at the flickering little flame. Hertha asked the camp’s Jewish-run children’s welfare department whether there might be a supervised place Liese could stay. They said there was room in a group of disabled children. It wasn’t ideal, but it was certainly better than leaving the gentle, affectionate seven-year-old girl unattended. Liese often spoke of this children’s group. Along with their caretakers, they had been deported from a German city—where, exactly, she no longer recalls. She remembers their strange accents and can still imitate some of their funny expressions: “Nahh!” “Greaaat!” “Don’ say dat!” Their caretakers were kind to her, but lessons were strictly forbidden in the camp, so Liese could only occasionally play with some of the other children. She felt lonely. Being separated from her mother was painful, even if she stopped by for daily visits, and she now saw her older sister, Helga, even more rarely.

Does anyone remember that children’s group? I send an inquiry to the Terezín Memorial Archives. The reply: it’s unlikely that Liese was in a dorm with disabled children. “Mentally ill” children were accommodated, alongside elderly and psychotic inmates, in the Cavaliers’ barracks. But there had been a building where behaviorally difficult children and “normal” children had stayed.

Liese is now in her eighties. She was once a ballet dancer with the Vienna Volksoper ensemble, went on to work as an accountant, and then spent many years with her husband’s film production company. She’s an engaging conversationalist, leaving everyone feeling fine after a good chat. Maybe her memory has begun deceiving her. But I don’t think that’s likely because as children, we tend to notice people who behave abnormally or look different. Furthermore, I’m now thoroughly convinced that the assumption the Nazi regime was rigorous about order and organization is dead wrong. After all, Hertha had previously achieved the impossible— not just once, but several times over—such as collecting her husband’s pension after his escape, obtaining a “protected status,” and postponing their transport to Theresienstadt. Other survivors tell of similar events. The Nazis didn’t care what happened in the camps as long as it didn’t cause them any trouble. Maintaining good organization implies that you deem someone respectful, worthy. In the eyes of the Nazis, Jews were worthless.

*

The day in Terezín is exhausting. We take a break in the memorial grounds’ dark cafe. We’re the only guests, and the only food on offer is a few pre-packaged sandwiches. As Liese bites into the dry bread, she jokes that she’s never eaten so well in Theresienstadt. Then she turns serious. “Actually, this is a city of murderers,” she says. Helga doesn’t bat an eye, and just slightly shrugs her shoulders. “It’s not the same people,” she replies. Perhaps she’s had this same conversation with herself before. Liese continues: “The Czech guards were the meanest.” “They were all different,” replies Helga. Liese is silent. The elder sister has the last word.