OVERSLEPT

“Get up! Up!” Shouts roused the inmates of Theresienstadt from their slumber one cold, dark night. It was 5:30 a.m. What was going on? Hertha jumped up from her cot and put on every bit of clothing she had, but it was still freezing. Then she wound her way through the high bunks and frightened roommates, down the stairs of the Sudeten barracks, out along the short street, and across the market square to the children’s dorm. Everyone everywhere was utterly confused. They were being pushed by SS officers—otherwise rarely seen in the camp—toward one of the gates. No one noticed Hertha as she pulled Liese from bed, walked with her to Helga’s dorm, and waited for her older daughter to come out. No matter what was about to happen, they would stay together.

They held each other’s hands, Liese in the middle, and joined the crowded current exiting the camp through the gate. In a huge field, they were told to stop. Orders were barked at them. There were numbered boards amid the grass, around which set groups of people were to gather. Guards posted on the surrounding hills pointed their rifles at them. Were they going to be shot? Or sent to the gas chambers?

Hours passed; they were told not to move. It was early November 1943 and the air was foggy and cold as ice. Liese recalls her spine-chilling fear; Helga remembers the bitter, cold wind, and coming down with a kidney infection after having to relieve herself out in the field.

Hours later, another order was barked at them: back to the camp! Nearly 30,000 people crowded through the gates, glad to be returning to Theresienstadt. Later on, they learned that thirty-odd prisoners had gone missing, hence the roll call.

*

When Liese wakes up one morning, she’s all alone. The other three-story bunks are empty, the other children are gone, and there isn’t a single caretaker in sight. Why did they leave her behind? Had she done something wrong? Unsettled, she rushes to her mother, who finds out what happened. The other children have been sent east this very morning, deported to an unknown destination. Some wanted to believe that it was a labor reassignment, but the disabled children’s caregivers probably guessed that wasn’t the case and had likely left Liese behind on purpose.

Liese first told me this story when I was in elementary school. She’d often pick up me and my cousin, who was one and a half years older, after school. First we’d go to the Turkish bakery, where Liese chatted with the owner while we got to pick out a pastry even though lunch was waiting for us at home. Then she’d drive us home in her bright-red Volkswagen Golf. We sat in the back, eating gummy bears and börek. Back then I found her stories tragic and eerie, but at the same time they remained complete abstractions. I suspect many grandchildren of Holocaust survivors grew up with similar experiences, eating sweets while hearing stories of children who were gassed. The Shoah was omnipresent— it stayed mostly in the background, but it didn’t take much for such stories to start pouring out. During my school’s Christmas break, for example, the family usually went on a ski trip. Then all the adults would suddenly decide to go home a day earlier than planned, with virtually no notice. They had lots to do in Vienna, they’d say. “We’re practicing for our escape,” my aunt once commented. It was a joke. But was it a joke?

Liese tells me she was glad to stay with her mother again after the other children had been deported. One of my great-grandmother’s roommates was an elderly German Jew, too frail to work. She managed to get some sheets of paper and taught Liese to read and write. Liese picks up two yellowed, lined sheets of paper and shows me the letterhead: “Jewish Administration Theresienstadt.” “What is our true home? Every person has a home. It can be a tiny little village, a big city, or even just a house in the woods. And this home is in a country … and so the Earth is home to us all, because all humans live and die on Earth,” one page reads. It’s clearly taken from dictation. The other page is a half-year report card of sorts: in character and comportment, Liese was graded an A. She earned a B in all other subjects, apart from arithmetic and spelling, which were deemed C’s.

*

In October 1944, Helga’s name appeared on the list of a “labor reassignment transport.” Several girls from her room were also listed, so Helga wasn’t overly worried. There were even rumors that there would be more to eat in the other camp. Hertha was suspicious, but she didn’t see any way to prevent being separated from her older daughter.

Early in the morning on the day she was to be deported, Helga reported to the large hall of the Hamburg barracks. Two thousand people were being lined up by number and sent in groups to the trains waiting in front of the massive yellow building. Helga and her heavy backpack were far behind, toward the rear. Her transport number was 1680, so it would take hours before it was her turn to get on the train. The weight of her bag cut into her shoulders, and the constant commotion, bad air, and hunger sapped all her strength. She looked around. SS officers were busy rushing people on board. People were wandering around, worried, searching for their luggage and relatives. Toward evening, Helga snuck out of the hall to find somewhere to rest a little while. In an empty room of the barracks, she discovered a cot and tattered straw mattress. She lay down and immediately fell asleep.

When she woke up, the trains had left.

Helga then reported to the administration. No problem, they said; the next transport would be leaving shortly. By autumn 1944, trains ran almost daily. More than 18,000 people were deported from Theresienstadt to the extermination camp at Auschwitz. Since January 1942, 70,000 had already been deported from the transit camp.

Hertha remained suspicious. She didn’t want to leave her daughter alone, so she, too, reported to the administration: she and Liese would go with Helga. That was what she had done in the spring of 1943, when Helga was to be deported to Theresienstadt on her own. That would not be permitted, she was told. Her two daughters could go, but she herself could not. Hertha knew Kaltenbrunner had promised her father nothing would happen to her. The transport list included many other mothers with their children. Was it really for “labor reassignment”? “Something’s fishy,” Hertha said to Helga. And she suggested Helga again try to slip out of the “sluice gate,” as the loading bay was called, without getting noticed. Nobody would pay particular attention to a fifteen-year-old girl by herself. Once again, Helga was assigned a high transport number. And, once again, she successfully snuck off.

My great-grandmother must have realized how unlikely it was that they’d be so lucky again. She decided to speak to the head of the farm where Helga routinely worked. He, too, was an SS member, but also had the reputation of not exploiting his laborers—it was said he didn’t work them to the bone. There is no record of how she got to him, how the conversation went, or how exactly she managed to convince him. We only know the outcome: from then on, Helga was deemed irreplaceable in the fields, and therefore wasn’t to be deported. By then only a few people were left in the camp. A few days later, on October 28, 1944, the last train left Theresienstadt for Auschwitz.

*

If you ask Helga about her time in Theresienstadt, she says she’d never have survived without her mother. It wasn’t just Hertha’s presence of mind that saved Helga from deportation. When her daughter was hungry, Hertha gave her the last piece of bread. And she encouraged Helga to take good care of herself using the washbasin and portable bidet she’d brought along to Theresienstadt, so they could stay as clean as possible. That was how she’d been taught at the boarding school for officers’ daughters, and she never gave those habits up. And of course her daughters were the same way. Helga proudly proclaims she was one of the few to never have lice, the dangerous parasites that transmitted typhoid fever. But even she was powerless against bedbugs; she’d clean the wooden frame of her cot with boiling water to get a few days’ reprieve, but soon after they’d be back.

When I think of Helga, I can smell her—a mixture of lightly perfumed skin cream, baby powder, and toothpaste. She passed this impeccable hygiene on to subsequent generations, safeguarded like an inheritance from her mother. “How often do you change your sheets?” she wanted to know when I returned to Vienna and, after staying with my parents the first few months, moved into an apartment of my own. “Every week, right?” I didn’t give a direct answer: “It depends …” She stared me down, quite stern, so I tried to shift focus. I told her I’d had classmates in college who didn’t change their sheets all semester. Helga wrinkled her nose and quickly changed the subject.

When we grandchildren were small enough that three or four of us fit into the tub together, Helga ritualistically oversaw our evening bath. “When did you last clean behind your ears?” she’d ask. Whatever our answer, she would insist on checking and express disgust if we weren’t up to par. “And your neck is filthy!” She’d take a washcloth, wet it, and scrub us down.

Hertha and Helga had a close mother-daughter relationship, but they still disagreed every now and then, even into old age. At the camp, Helga was the most important person for Hertha: “You’re the one who has to replace my mother, husband, and friends,” Hertha wrote in a letter to her daughter on the occasion of Helga’s fifteenth birthday, in February 1944. She admits she scolds Helga a little too often but goes on to write that she only does it so others won’t reprimand her for not raising her daughter right. I’ve read that a formal tone reigned over most conversations in Theresienstadt. It was customary among Austrian and German Jews to address one another formally and use people’s full academic or other honorary titles. Hertha was under enormous pressure. She worried about her children’s future, and rumors about the fate of those who’d been deported must have weighed on her. The more pressure people endure, the more they argue, because fear and insecurity wear our nerves down. Staying in contact with the outside world helped Hertha a little: letters and small parcels from her father and his wife routinely arrived from Vienna. Her husband, Paul, had also regularly written her postcards from the Italian camp, but since mid-1944 she hadn’t gotten any more messages from him. Their shared acquaintances in Vienna hadn’t heard from him either.