L I S A P E S C H E L
1 Some scholars today find the term “ghetto” too euphemistic. It was not
euphemistic enough for the Nazis. As of May 1, 1943, the term was forbidden and
the term Jüdisches Siedlungsgebiet (Jewish settlement area) was used in all official
documents. See Martin Niklas, “ . . . die schönste Stadt der Welt”: Österreichische
Jüdinnen und Juden in Theresienstadt (Vienna: DÖW, 2009), p. 51.
I N T R O D U C T I O N
This volume presents theatrical works that speak to us from the
very heart of the Holocaust: they were written by Czechoslovak
and Austrian Jews imprisoned during the Second World War in the
Terezín/Theresienstadt ghetto. Before engaging with the plays
themselves, however, let us engage with a question that has vexed
scholars for decades: What to call this place where such a thriving
cultural life sprung up and where so many lost their lives? The
right to grant a name is a particular form of power. In this volume
I use the names chosen by those who have the greatest right to that
power: the prisoners themselves.
Should the Czech “Terezín” or the German “Theresienstadt”
be used? When the Nazis chose this fortress town as the site of the
ghetto, both names had been in use for over 150 years. It was built
in the 1780s in a bilingual region about 60 km northwest of
Prague, near the present-day Czech–German border. The Czechand
German-speaking authors of the plays in this volume used the
name more familiar to them. Therefore, in the translations of
the authors’ texts I use the name they used; in my own texts, except
for proper names of organizations, etc., I use the dual form
“Terezín/Theresienstadt.”
Should Terezín/Theresienstadt be called a “ghetto”? 1 A concentration
camp? Or was it, as Czech historian and survivor
Miroslav Kárný argued, unikum sui generis, a site unlike any other
in the Nazi system of ghettos and camps? The prisoners themselves,
as their texts reveal, called it the “ghetto;” the survivors in
their testimony often alternate between “ghetto” and “camp.”
I will call it, as the prisoners did, the ghetto. However, more
important than the name is an understanding of the conditions the
prisoners actually faced. The historical overview later in this introduction
describes daily life in Terezín/Theresienstadt and the setting
in which these plays were written and performed.
Finally, what should the phenomenon of theatrical performance
in the ghetto be called? The word used most often today to
describe the cultural life of Terezín/Theresienstadt is “resistance.”
If resistance is defined too narrowly, however, as defiance against
the Nazis, it may limit our understanding of the many reasons why
the prisoners performed.
THEATRICAL TEXTS FROM TEREZÍN/THERESIENSTADT AND
RESISTANCE
Terezín/Theresienstadt played a prominent role in Nazi propaganda
as a “model ghetto,” displayed to representatives of the Red
Cross in June 1944 to deceive the world about the true nature of
the Final Solution. Although it is well known that performances
took place during this inspection—for example, the commission
watched the children’s opera Brundibár—the cultural life of the
ghetto did not emerge on Nazi orders. In fact, the vast majority of
the cultural events in the ghetto were initiated by the prisoners, for
the prisoners. The first documented event, a “variety evening” in
the prisoners’ barracks, took place on December 5 or 6, 1941, just
two weeks after the first transport arrived.2 By the spring of 1944,
performances and lectures were taking place on more than a dozen
stages in the ghetto.3
Although the Nazis attempted to portray Terezín/
Theresienstadt as an independent “Jewish settlement area,” the
reality of the ghetto was much grimmer. It was the final stop for
more than 30,000 Central and Western European Jews, most from
LISAPESCHEL
2
2 See Erich Weiner, “Freizeitgestaltung in Theresienstadt,” in Rebecca Rovit and
Alvin Goldfarb (eds.), Theatrical Performance during the Holocaust: Texts,
Documents, Memoirs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp.
209–30, see p. 217; and the Terezín Memorial, inv. no. PT 3878.
3 For a list of the performance spaces see the Terezín Memorial, inv. no. PT 3765.
Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Germany, who perished within its
walls. For thousands more, it was only a way station on the journey
to the slave-labor and death camps. Yet it was also a place where
many prisoners became intensely aware of the meaning and power
of art.4 Among those who spent months, or even years, in
Terezín/Theresienstadt, a vigorous cultural life emerged: adults and
children drew and painted, composed, played and sang musical
works, wrote poems, essays, and plays. Not all the prisoners participated
in the cultural life, and only a small fraction of the works produced
has survived. Nevertheless, the testimony of those who were
involved, and the drawings, texts, and sheet music that have been
preserved reveal a world where art, as one survivor wrote, “transcend[ed]
itself and acquir[ed] a dimension of sheer survival.”5
During my research in Europe and Israel on theatrical performance
in the ghetto, the works in this volume—cabarets, puppet plays,
historical and verse dramas, short sketches, poems and songs, a radio
program, and a Purimspiel—came to light in private collections and
small archives. Although short texts from Terezín/Theresienstadt had
been published in previous anthologies, these newly discovered
works included complete, full-length scripts, some including original
sheet music.6 Most of the authors were unknown; for those
whose works had been published, significant new material had come
to light.7 With the help of survivors who explained to me the meaning
of many disguised jokes and veiled references, a bilingual Czech–
German annotated volume of the texts was published in 2008.8
3
INTRODUCTION
4 See the prologue in this volume.
5 Mirko Tůma, “Memories of Theresienstadt,” in Rovit and Goldfarb, Theatrical
Performance during the Holocaust, pp. 265–73; see p. 271.
6 See the bibliography for a list of previously published collections of theatrical
texts from the ghetto.
7 For previously published authors Leo Strauss and Hans Hofer, new songs and
poems were found. For František Kowanitz’s song lyrics for the musical revue Prince
Bettliegend, an outline of the plot was reconstructed on the basis of several survivor
testimonies. Significant new information on Hanuš Hachenburg’s puppet play Looking
for a Specter was provided by his friend and fellow survivor Kurt Jiří Kotouč.
8 See the acknowledgements in this volume and www.akropolis.info/terezin for
information in Czech, German, and English.
For this revised and expanded English-language edition, all
translations were prepared with performance in mind. The brief
introductions to each play are based on survivor testimony, archival
materials, a wealth of published diaries and secondary sources on
the ghetto, and, above all, a network of living memory. Very few
of these scripts are abandoned artifacts. Surviving relatives and
friends were able to provide much insight into the influences that
shaped the scripts and their authors’ lives. In addition, within the
texts themselves, extensive footnotes explain references to life
before the war and in Terezín/Theresienstadt.
Insight into these texts, however, requires more than footnotes.
We must also consider the prisoners’ own relationship to theatrical
performance. As testimony reveals, the survivors have long been
concerned about misinterpretations of the cultural life of the ghetto.
In an essay written in Prague in 1961, Terezín/Theresienstadt actress
Jana Šedová warned against “two dangerous and incorrect views:”
underestimating the prisoners’ suffering (that is, assuming that conditions
must not have been so bad if cultural activities could take
place), and overestimating the heroism of the performers.9
In the historical section of the essay that follows I attempt to
address Šedová’s first concern and dispel any suspicion that the
cultural activities took place because life in the ghetto was easy.
Instead, readers are presented with a paradox: deprivation itself
spurred the prisoners to perform. As one survivor wrote, “In spite
of all the harassment, dirt, ugliness, and horror, or rather, exactly
because of them, we all sought stimulus through which it would
be possible to live and draw hope. It was in the cabaret [. . .] that
we forgot about the powerlessness of our daily lives.”10
Šedová’s second concern becomes clearer when we consider its
context. Various groups in post-war and subsequently communist
Czechoslovakia tried to use the prisoners as symbols—of suffering,
LISAPESCHEL
4
9 Jana Šedová, program notes to Poslední cyklista, Divadlo Rokoko, Prague,
1961. Šedová (née Truda Popperová) performed in one of the works in this volume,
Prince Bettliegend.
10 lb, “Svědectví ‘posledního cyklisty,’” Hlas revoluce, June 22, 1961.
of resistance, of victimization—to serve ends that were sometimes
in conflict with those of survivors.11 Šedová’s warning is still valid.
Works from Terezín/Theresienstadt are now performed and exhibited
all over the world, and one rarely finds a set of program notes
that does not include the phrase “spiritual resistance.” Musical
works from the ghetto that have received the most recognition tend
to be those that contain an element of defiance: Brundibár, where
children defeat the black-mustached villain, and The Emperor of
Atlantis (Der Kaiser von Atlantis), where the tyrannical Emperor is
forced to surrender to Death. But as the works in this volume
reveal, the prisoners sometimes had other goals: to indulge in nostalgia
for their homes, to satirize their own behavior and that of
their leaders, to enjoy a moment of aesthetic pleasure and escape.
A narrow definition of resistance that includes only acts of defiance
leaves no room to acknowledge how important these aspects of
theater were to the prisoners themselves. If resistance is more than
defiance, how can we widen our view of this concept without
defining the term so broadly that it becomes meaningless?
We can craft a more compelling definition by asking the
question: Resistance against what? In addition to resistance against
the Nazis, the prisoners had to fight a more general and insidious
enemy, one mentioned by the survivor quoted above: resistance
against powerlessness. This is not an abstract problem, for it is
intimately tied with an issue that directly affected the prisoners’
survival: they had to find ways to manage the feelings of fear, helplessness,
and loss of control that are the symptoms of psychological
trauma. According to Judith Herman, Professor of Clinical
Psychiatry at Harvard University Medical School, “Traumatic
events are extraordinary [. . .] because they overwhelm the ordinary
5
INTRODUCTION
11 For example, in the immediate post-war period, communists used narratives
of Nazi brutality in the ghetto to support their program of expelling all “Germans”
from Czechoslovakia, even though some of those labeled “Germans” were actually
German-speaking Czechoslovak Jews. See Lisa Peschel, “The Prosthetic Life:
Theatrical Performance, Survivor Testimony and the Terezín Ghetto, 1941–
1963” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, Minneapolis and St. Paul, 2009),
pp. 97–8.
human adaptations to life.”12 In the ghetto, quick adaptation to
the new conditions was a matter of life and death. Theatrical performance
could not change these conditions, but it could help the
prisoners counteract the intense feelings of fear and helplessness in
a way that kept them from becoming paralyzed by despair and
enabled them to go on with the daily fight for life.
How might this have functioned? As Herman argues, since
helplessness is the essential insult of trauma, the guiding principle
of recovery is to restore a sense of power and control.13 In
Terezín/Theresienstadt, where the prisoners’ ability to control any
aspect of their environment was greatly limited, the cultural life
became a sphere where they could actually exercise some agency—
that is, where they could exert some degree of control over their
experience. In some performances, they exercised this agency by
confronting the ghetto, experiencing it in a more psychologically
manageable way by bringing it onto the stage and forcing it to
behave according to their rules. In others, the prisoners shut out
the ghetto, escaping into a world of their own creation.
Escapism in Terezín/Theresienstadt theater often meant escape
into the past, which was also an engagement with their imagined
future. Few of the prisoners were able to acknowledge that, even if
they survived, the post-war world would be a radically different
place. Instead, most of them firmly believed they would return to
a life just like the one they remembered.14 Therefore, the theater
artists brought the world of their past onto the stage, not to mourn
its loss, but to anticipate its return. Perhaps the most vivid example
is Laugh with Us: The Second Czech Cabaret. Written and performed
in the spring of 1944, the cabaret is set in a post-war
Prague that is identical with the Prague of the authors’ past. As the
main characters, Porges and Horpatzky, stroll around the city,
“reminiscing” about their time in Terezín, they visit well-known
LISAPESCHEL
6
12 Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from
Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 33.
13 Ibid., pp. 41, 159.
14 Emil Utitz, Psychologie života v terezínském koncentračním táboře (Prague:
Dělnické nakladatelství, 1947), p. 24.
pre-war bars and clubs, listen to music from the 1930s, and avoid
one of their favorite restaurants—Horpatzky still owes the headwaiter
money from the pre-war days.
Authors who confronted the ghetto in their works often
created comic allegories. In one scene of Radio Show, co-author
Kurt Egerer placed Terezín in a harmless, familiar framework by
reinterpreting it as the setting for a fairy tale based on Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs. In his story for children, hardships in the
ghetto are transformed into advantages for the “dwarfs.” For example,
the bedbugs that plagued the prisoners are described as little
pets that watch over them at night as they sleep. Even the meager
food supply is explained in a fairy tale-appropriate way: dwarfs have
little tiny stomachs, so tiny rations are enough for them.
As the plays in this volume reveal, defiance toward their captors
was just one element in a whole range of strategies the authors
used to confront the unprecedented crisis they faced. If we widen
our definition of resistance to encompass all the forms of opposition
to powerlessness that they exercised within the symbolic space
of performance, we become true witnesses to these authors and to
all the Terezín/Theresienstadt prisoners who engaged so intensely
with theatrical performance in the ghetto.
THE JEWS OF VIENNA, BOHEMIA, AND MORAVIA, AND
THEATER BEFORE THE SECOND WORLD WAR
The scripts written in Terezín/Theresienstadt bear the marks of
their authors’ experiences in the ghetto, but they reflect just as
vividly the cultural influences that shaped them before the war.
All the plays in the collection were written by Czech- and Germanspeaking
Jews from Bohemia and Moravia (the western provinces
of Czechoslovakia) and the Austrian city of Vienna.15 To
appreciate the diversity of the prisoners’ theatrical responses to
7
INTRODUCTION
15 Surprisingly, during my research for this collection, no new theatrical texts by
German-Jewish authors came to light.
Terezín/Theresienstadt, we must first look at the diversity of the
Central European Jews.
Until 1918, Jews from these regions had all been citizens of a
vast empire ruled by the Habsburg dynasty. They had shared the
historical process of emancipation that began in the late eighteenth
century, when emperor Joseph II lifted certain legal restrictions
on Jews, and were fully emancipated in 1867—the year that the
Habsburg Empire became the Dual Monarchy of AustriaHungary—when
parliaments of both Austria and Hungary
granted them equality before the law. During the processes of
modernization and secularization, regional differences created different
forms of Jewish identity and different kinds of relationships
with non-Jews.
The Jews of Austria-Hungary lived in a monarchy where
people of different languages, cultures, and ethnicities considered
themselves different nations. Unlike German Jews, who lived in a
country where language, nation, and state were the same (German
language, German Volk, German state), Jews under Habsburg rule
had to reconcile various claims to their loyalty. Historian Marsha
L. Rozenblit suggests that, as a result, Jews developed a tripartite
identity. They were loyal to their Habsburg rulers, identified
with the languages and cultures of their own region, and still felt
they belonged to the Jewish people. Jewish identity could range
from the traditional position that Jews were a nation in exile
awaiting redemption, to a liberal perspective that saw Jewish identity
as simply a religious one, to a Zionist or diasporic nationalist
stance with its insistence that Jews should form a modern secular
nation.16
The influence of Reform or Liberal Judaism was also different
in Germany and Austria-Hungary. In Germany, Liberal Jews rejected
the traditional notion that Jews still formed a separate nation
hoping to return to Israel and professed their full loyalty to the
16 Marsha L. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg
Austria during World War I (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001),
p. 162.
LISAPESCHEL
8
German state and people.17 In Vienna, because of differences in
the way that the Reform movement was introduced and waves of
Jewish migration in the late nineteenth century, modern Jews
adopted the form of Liberal Judaism but the content of worship
remained traditional. On the one hand, there was pressure from
more traditional Jews from other parts of Austria-Hungary to
retain prayers for a return to Zion; on the other, because AustriaHungary
was composed of so many different nations, the idea
of a separate Jewish nation was not such an anomaly.18 Ultraorthodox
tradition was represented in Vienna as well, due to the
migration of Yiddish-speaking Jews from Galicia, the Bukovina,
and the Pressburg area of Hungary (now Bratislava in Slovakia).
They quickly adopted the German language; some modernized,
but others retained their own traditional religious practices.
Jews in Bohemia and Moravia adopted a similar style of worship
that combined Liberal form with traditional content, but
ultra-orthodoxy gained little foothold in this region. Bohemian
and Moravian Jews spoke the languages of their non-Jewish neighbors,
German and Czech, and, especially in small towns, continued
to lead a traditional Jewish lifestyle.19
In the late nineteenth century, anti-Semitism affected both
groups in different ways. In Vienna, largely due to the influence
of powerful mayor Karl Lueger and his Christian-Social Party
(which controlled the Vienna City Council from 1895 to 1919),
anti-Semitism became a political instrument, and was considered
“respectable” even for the middle classes.20 Austrian anti-Semitism
was different from Nazi anti-Semitism in that, at least until the
late 1930s, it was not based on “racial” hatred but rather on
17 Marsha L. Rozenblit, “The Jews of Germany and Austria: A Comparative
Perspective,” in Robert S. Wistrich (ed.), Austrians and Jews in the Twentieth
Century: From Franz Joseph to Waldheim (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992),
pp. 1–18, see p. 3.
18 Ibid., pp. 11–12.
19 Ibid., p. 2.
20 Robert S. Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 236.
9
INTRODUCTION
Catholic teachings and economic resentment, especially by the
lower middle classes who blamed Jews for their economic problems.
However, Lueger’s own recognition that Vienna needed
its Jewish economic elites led to an uneasy but functioning
coexistence. As historian Robert S. Wistrich succinctly puts it, “In
spite of its vulgarity, Christian-Social anti-Semitism did not
generate any pogroms in Vienna.”21 In fact, during this period,
Jews made tremendous contributions to what we know as
Viennese culture: Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von
Hofmannsthal, Arnold Schoenberg, and Gustav Mahler were all
Jewish or of Jewish descent.22
In response to increasing anti-Semitism, Liberal Jews founded
the Austria-Israelite Union. Its members emphasized their dedication
to German-language Austrian culture, but they also helped to
define a positive Jewish group identity that exceeded the bounds of
religion to include a sense of ethnic consciousness.23 The rise of the
Zionist movement, whether focused on actual emigration to a
Jewish homeland or on a sense of Jewish nationhood in the diaspora,
also offered new positive models of Jewish identity.
In Bohemia and Moravia, a different factor emerged as a central
element in anti-Semitism: Jews were caught in the middle of
the nationality conflict. During the nineteenth century, Czech and
German speakers in the region began increasingly to consider
themselves not just separate language communities but separate
nations. During the process of emancipation, many Jews had
assimilated to the elite language and culture of the empire, that is,
German. Now they found themselves alternately pressured to join
the Czech national movement, rejected by both sides as a group
that could never belong to either nation, and criticized for taking
sides out of opportunism. Nevertheless, even though the dominant
LISAPESCHEL
10
21 Ibid., p. 237.
22 For a more detailed description of Jewish contributions to Viennese fin de
siècle culture see Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1989).
23 Rozenblit, “The Jews of Germany and Austria,” p. 7.
political party, the Young Czechs, began to use anti-Semitism as a
political weapon in the late eighteenth century, the influence of the
Czech national movement increased among Jews.24 Many Czechassimilated
Jews shifted their support to the Realist party, led
by the future president of Czechoslovakia, Thomas Garrigue
Masaryk.25 The Zionist movement also gained ground, especially
because the idea of a separate Jewish nationality offered a way out
of the increasingly tense Czech–German nationality conflict.
By the early twentieth century, the patterns of Jewish identification
that would persist in Bohemia and Moravia until the Second
World War had been established. As Hillel Kieval writes,
[Modern Czech Jewry] grew out of the transformation of
“Bohemian” Jewry: the Czech national Jew, the discoverers
of Jewish nationality, the bilingual, but nationally indifferent,
mass of rural and small-town Jews, the bridge-builders
between German and Czech culture, and the ever-dwindling
number of defenders of the German cultural ideal. All of
these tendencies are present in the modern Czech-Jewish
community.26
After the First World War, when Austria-Hungary was divided into
several successor states, the Jews of Vienna, Bohemia, and Moravia
found themselves in different countries, under different governments,
and in fundamentally different situations.
After 1918, all that remained of once-great “Austria” was a small
republic, initially named “German Austria” (Deutschösterreich),
11
INTRODUCTION
24 In the census of 1890, 66 percent of Bohemian Jews indicated German as
their language; by 1900, 54 percent declared it to be Czech. See Hillel J. Kieval,
“Jews, Czechs and Germans in Bohemia before 1914,” in Robert S. Wistrich (ed.),
Austrians and Jews in the Twentieth Century: From Franz Joseph to Waldheim
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), pp. 19–37, see p. 26. However, many of
those who assimilated to Czech-language culture continued to value a German
cultural affiliation. Even in 1910, almost 90 percent of Jewish children in Prague
were enrolled in German-language schools. See Gary B. Cohen, The Politics of
Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1981), p. 224.
25 Ibid., pp. 21, 28.
26 Hillel J. Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry: National Conflict and Jewish
Society in Bohemia, 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 4.
plagued by post-war shortages, economic crises, and political
instability.27 The Christian-Social Party continued to play a dominant
role in Austrian politics, and the peculiarly Austrian form of
religious and economic anti-Semitism remained firmly woven
into the social fabric of the Republic. Although the government
refused the Zionists’ repeated attempts to gain formal recognition
for Jews as a separate nationality, Austrian anti-Semitism did not
translate into official discrimination and anti-Jewish laws. In the
Social Democratic Party, the only party that accepted Jewish
members, many held positions of leadership. However, their role
in public life ended in 1934, when the Austrian Civil War led to a
form of authoritarian rule called “Austrofascism.” The new regime
identified itself as pro-Austria and anti-National Socialism; unlike
Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, Austrofascism did not translate
into state persecution of Austrian Jews. Many Jewish leaders in
the Social Democratic Party were arrested after the social democratic
movement was outlawed, but conditions did not substantially
worsen for the Jewish population in general.
Many Jews in Austria continued to try to balance political
loyalty to the Austrian state with dedication to German-language
culture and their own sense of Jewish identity, whether that identity
was Zionist/nationalist or religious with a sense of ethnic
belonging. However, as the influence of Nazi Germany increased,
more and more non-Jewish Austrians began to adopt a sense of
belonging to a German Volk or nation rather than simply to
German-language culture—a Volk to which Jews could not hope
to belong. In response, Jewish communities became more insular
and they asserted their Jewish identity more forcefully.28
LISAPESCHEL
12
27 On September 10, 1919, the name of the republic was changed from
“German Austria” to “Austria.”
28 Marsha L. Rozenblit, “Jewish Ethnicity in a New Nation-State: The Crisis of
Identity in the Austrian Republic,” in Michael Brenner and Derek Jonathan
Penslar (eds.), In Search of Jewish Community: Jewish Identities in Germany and
Austria, 1918–1933 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp.
134–53, see p. 145.
The situation in the new state of Czechoslovakia was more hospitable
for many reasons.29 Newly won independence created a
mood of optimism rather than defeat.30 The territories within
its borders included much of the former empire’s industrial base,
placing the new state on a firm economic footing. Perhaps most
importantly, the new government refused to condone anti-Semitism.
Although incidents of anti-Jewish violence erupted after the war,
the Jews had faith that President Thomas Masaryk would bring the
situation under control and create a tolerant and just society.31
Jewish attitudes toward the new state were mostly positive.
Those who identified with the Czech national struggle supported
the new order enthusiastically.32 Others were encouraged when
Czechoslovakia granted wide-ranging rights to the “national minorities”
within its borders, which included Germans, Hungarians,
Ruthenes, Poles, and Jews, recognized as a nationality in the country’s
first constitution of February 29, 1920.33 Thus, in Bohemia
and Moravia, Jews were able to maintain a tripartite identity if they
so desired: politically Czechoslovak, culturally Czech or German,
and religiously, ethnically, or nationally Jewish.34
29 Czechoslovakia was formed from the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, the
Hungarian territory of Slovakia, and parts of Silesia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia.
30 Not all groups wanted to be citizens of the new state: German-speaking
regions unsuccessfully sought independence or union with Austria. See Derek
Sayer, The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1998), pp. 168–69.
31 Marsha L. Rozenblit, “Sustaining Austrian ‘National’ Identity in Crisis: The
Dilemma of the Jews in Habsburg Austria, 1914–1919,” in Pieter M. Judson and
Marsha L. Rozenblit (eds.), Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe
(Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005), pp. 178–91, see p. 186.
32 Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry, pp. 183–86, 192.
33 Tatjana Lichtenstein, “Making Jews at Home: Jewish Nationalism in the
Bohemian Lands, 1918–1938” (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 2009), p. 68.
Debates raged as to whether “nationality” on the Czechoslovak census should
mean the individual’s subjective choice of nationality or whether it should be
based on more objective criteria. The Statistical Bureau ultimately decided that
nationality was to be understood as ethnic belonging, with mother tongue as the
main criterion; however, Jews were allowed to choose Jewish nationality regardless
of language spoken. See ibid., pp. 80–1.
34 Rozenblit, “Sustaining Austrian ‘National’ Identity,” p. 186.
13
INTRODUCTION
However, because the government rejected anti-Semitism,
and because Czech anti-Semitism was often associated with resentment
of Jews’ perceived preference for German-language culture,
other options were open to them. Some Jews who embraced
Czech language and culture encountered little anti-Semitism and
assimilated thoroughly into the Czech cultural sphere—their
Jewishness became simply a religion or, for those who were completely
secular, only a vague sense of family origin.
The situation was more complex for those who were assimilated
to German-language culture. In Prague, as the proportion of
Czech speakers increased, the German-speaking Jews—a group that
included noted authors Franz Kafka and Max Brod—saw their
world as “a game preserve whose ground was always shrinking
. . . an iceberg that the surrounding waters slowly eroded.”35
As Hitler’s power grew, those who lived in the largely Germanspeaking
border regions (called the Sudetenland) saw their nonJewish
neighbors’ sense of belonging to a racially defined German
nation increase. The Zionists of Czechoslovakia, encouraged by the
government’s recognition of Jewish nationality, continued to try
and persuade their fellow Jews to consider themselves a separate
Jewish nation, removed from the Czech–German nationality conflict.36
Others saw no conflict in belonging simultaneously to both
Zionist and Czech or German organizations.37 In the 1930 census
in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, of those who indicated Judaism
as their religion, 36 percent chose Czechoslovak nationality, 31 percent
chose Jewish, and 30 percent chose German,38 with Jews in
LISAPESCHEL
14
35 Emil Utitz, quoted in Scott Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflict and
Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin De Siècle (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000), p. 3.
36 Lichtenstein, “Making Jews at Home,” p. 7.
37 See the example of Karel Fleischmann in Kateřina Čapková, “Tschechisch,
Deutsch, Jüdisch—wo ist der Unterschied? Zur Komplexität von nationalen
Identitäten der böhmischen Juden 1918–1938,” in Marek Nekula and Walter
Koschmal (eds.), Juden zwischen Deutschen und Tschechen: sprachliche und
kulturelle Identitäten in Böhmen 1800–1945 (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag,
2006), pp. 73–84, see p. 73.
38 Livia Rothkirchen, “The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: 1938–1945,” in
Avigdor Dagan, Gertrude Hirschler, and Lewis Weiner (eds.), The Jews of
Moravia much more likely to claim Jewish nationality than those
in Bohemia.39
Religious practice among the Bohemian and Moravian Jews
varied widely. Although some continued in orthodox observance
of Jewish law, many observed only selected holidays, while thousands
left Judaism completely, or converted to other faiths.40
Instances of intermarriage also increased; of Jews who married
between 1928 and 1933, 43 percent in Bohemia and 30 percent in
Moravia married non-Jews.41 Geographically, they were also much
more integrated with their non-Jewish neighbors than their
Austrian counterparts. In 1934, the vast majority (92 percent) of
Austria’s 191,000 Jews lived in Vienna.42 In Bohemia, according
to the 1930 census, approximately 50 percent of the province’s
76,000 Jews lived in Prague; in Moravia, less than 30 percent of
the province’s 41,000 Jews lived in the capital city of Brno/Brünn.
Furthermore, most political organizations had Jewish members.43
They participated actively in the public life of the state,
where a democratic government remained in power right until the
eve of the Second World War.
15
INTRODUCTION
Czechoslovakia: Historical Studies and Surveys, VOL. 3 (Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society of America, 1984), pp. 3–74, see p. 12.
39 In Bohemia, 46 percent chose Czechoslovak, 31 percent German, and 20
percent Jewish nationality. In Moravia-Silesia, 52 percent chose Jewish, 29 percent
German, and 18 percent Czechoslovak nationality. See Ezra Mendelsohn,
The Jews of East Central Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983),
p. 159.
40 In March 1941, of the 74,417 Jews “by race” still in Bohemia and Moravia,
12,168 were not of Jewish faith. Of those, 46 percent were unaffiliated with any
church. The next largest group, comprising 40 percent, were baptized Catholics.
See Livia Rothkirchen, The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: Facing the Holocaust
(Lincoln and Jerusalem: University of Nebraska Press; Jerusalem: Yad Vashem,
2005), pp. 341, 92ff.
41 Kateřina Čapková, Češi, Němci, Židé? Národní identita Židů v Čechách,
1918–1938 (Prague: Paseka, 2005), p. 21.
42 Gerhard Botz, “The Dynamics of Persecution in Austria, 1938–45,” in
Wistrich, Austrians and Jews in the Twentieth Century, pp. 199–219, see p. 201.
43 Exceptions included specifically Christian parties such as the Catholic
People’s Party and pro-Hitler parties, including the Sudeten German Party and
Czech fascist parties, such as the Flag (Vlajka).
In both Austria and Czechoslovakia, Jews took part in the
vibrant cultural life of the inter-war years that generated the theatrical
influences we see in the Terezín/Theresienstadt scripts. In
Bohemia and Moravia, they had every opportunity to participate in
the cultural boom that followed the establishment of the new state.
Austrian Jews’ investment in cultural pursuits may have increased,
as Michael Pollak suggests, during this period “when all political
pursuits appeared to be in vain.”44
In Austrian theater of the period immediately following the
First World War, social and political critique did not play a prominent
role.45 Unlike the Berlin cabarets, which were marked by
biting satire, Viennese cabarets indulged primarily in harmless
humor and Austattungsrevues—comic and musical acts linked by a
common theme with extravagant sets and costumes. Comic duo
Karl Farkas and Fritz Grünbaum created a tremendously popular
new form of musical revue that combined the visual spectacle of
the Austattungsrevue with the verbal humor of the literary cabaret.
With the rise of Nazi Germany and Austrofascism, cabarets
and revues became more pointed. Stella Kadmon’s literary cabaret
Dear Augustin (Der liebe Augustin) began to address the political
situation with texts by anti-fascist writers, including Kurt
Tucholsky and Erich Kästner. Rudolf Spitz’s The Gooseberry (Die
Stachelbeere) presented politically aggressive one-act plays and
playlets. ABC, politically the sharpest among the cabarets, featured
the works of authors like Jura Soyfer, who satirized the National
Socialists and the Austrofascists. Unlike in Nazi Germany, where
all criticism was repressed, censorship in Austria was neither as
extreme nor as effective.46 Theater artists developed great skill in
LISAPESCHEL
16
44 Michael Pollak, “Cultural Innovation and Social Identity in fin-de-siècle
Vienna,” in Ivar Oxaal, Michael Pollak, and Gerhard Botz (eds.), Jews, AntiSemitism,
and Culture in Vienna (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987),
pp. 59–74, see p. 71.
45 Jürgen Doll, Theater im roten Wien. Vom sozialdemokratischen Agitprop zum
dialektischen Theater Jura Soyfers (Vienna, Cologne and Weimar: Böhlau, 1997).
46 Horst Jarka, “Einleitung,” in Horst Jarka (ed.), Jura Soyfer. Das Gesamtwerk
(Vienna, Munich and Zurich: Europaverlag, 1980), pp. 13–27, see p. 18.
hiding their critical views between the lines to avoid drawing the
attention of the censor while still reaching their intended audience.
Specifically Jewish theater and cabaret thrived in Vienna
and several theaters offered programs of melodrama, operettas,
comedies, and revues. Yiddish-language theaters performed Zionist
revues, and Oscar Teller and Victor Schlesinger founded a specifically
Zionist cabaret. The Jewish Culture Theater (Jüdisches
Kulturtheater) offered a contemporary and artistically ambitious
program that included Yiddish classics.47
In Czechoslovakia, Czech-language theater embraced the
influences of international artistic movements. For example, the
directorial style of Karel Hugo Hilar, head of drama at the Czech
National Theater, combined elements of expressionism and realism,
and his productions, including stagings of works by Karel
Čapek, won accolades across Europe.48 In 1927, artists who were
to have tremendous influence on Czech-language theatrical performance
in Terezín/Theresienstadt burst onto the scene. Law students
Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich became overnight sensations
with their Vest Pocket Revue, a series of short, satiric scenes with
music, which opened in April 1927, and ran for over 200 performances.49
As their style developed during the 1930s, the plots of
their performances became more unified, but they maintained the
original combination of literate good humor, commentary on local
and international events, and jazz music by their legendary pianist
and composer, Jaroslav Ježek. Especially popular were their improvised
sequences delivered directly to the audience, the forbiny (from
German Vorbühne, forestage), where they satirized, among other
things, Czech nationalist chauvinism. Also in April 1927, young
director E. F. Burian presented his first “voiceband” performance,
17
INTRODUCTION
47 For an excellent description of Jewish theater in Vienna, see Brigitte Dalinger,
“Verloschene Sterne”: Geschichte des jüdischen Theaters in Wien (Vienna:
Picus Verlag, 1998).
48 Jarka Burian, Modern Czech Theatre: Reflector and Conscience of a Nation
(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), pp. 24–8, 38.
49 Ibid., p. 41.
a striking choral form which blended complex recitation and nonverbal
sounds with rhythmic, syncopated music.50
Czech theaters became increasingly politicized as Nazi
Germany grew more powerful. Karel Čapek, who had concentrated
on fiction rather than playwriting for 10 years, returned to the
national stage in the late 1930s with two devastating plays foreshadowing
the horrors of war: The White Plague (Bílá nemoc) and
The Mother (Matka).51 Voskovec and Werich, now running their
own venue, the Liberated Theater (Osvobozené divadlo), performed
a series of increasingly pointed yet optimistic satirical
reviews. Their two final productions in 1937–38, Heavy Barbara
(Těžká Barbora) and The Eyesore (Pěst na oko), played to packed
houses, and reinforced audience morale with their faith in the
strength of ordinary but united people.52 Burian founded his own
theater, D34, in the fall of 1933.53 One of his most remarkable performances
was Military Service (Vojna), an anti-war piece created
from a montage of Czech folk texts, performed with songs and
dances. In the spring of 1938, he started developing a new performance
titled Esther. This work, based on the sympathetic portrayal
of Jewish characters in a Czech-language folk play dating
back to the eighteenth century, soon became politically dangerous.
German-language theater continued to thrive in Bohemia and
Moravia after the First World War, especially in Prague, Brno/
Brünn and in the Sudetenland. In the 1920s, there was little artistic
cooperation between Czech-language and German-language
theaters. Most exchanges took place internationally with other
German-speaking countries and guest artists and troupes visited
from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Since most provincial
German-language theaters saw themselves as bastions of high
culture, avant-garde performances were rarely imported. For
LISAPESCHEL
18
50 Burian, Modern Czech Theatre, p. 43.
51 The White Plague was staged in 1937 and The Mother in 1938, both at the
National Theater in Prague.
52 Ibid., p. 51.
53 D34 stands for divadlo (theater) and the season in which the troupe was
founded. The number was updated every year.
example, although troupes from Vienna performed contemporary
scripts, they rarely used the latest methods of staging. Viennese
cabaret artists like Farkas and Grünbaum, however, played in Czech
cities, and brought the latest German-language comic styles with
them. The New German Theater in Prague, founded in 1888,
offered a rich program, their specialty being operas and operettas.
Specifically Jewish theater did not play as significant a cultural
role in Bohemia and Moravia as it did in Vienna. Yiddish
troupes from Vienna, Berlin, and Bucharest toured the larger
cities, but a single traveling troupe based in Slovakia was the first
and only Czechoslovak troupe playing in Yiddish during the interwar
period.54 A few German-language Jewish troupes were established,
but they failed to gain a permanent foothold.55
After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, many German-Jewish
artists and political dissidents sought refuge in Austria and
Czechoslovakia. In Austria, these artists created a boom in the number
of small cabarets in Vienna.56 In Prague, the New German
Theater was especially enriched by this influx of talent and became
a center of democratic German-language culture. A few of the
newly arrived artists formed their own anti-fascist troupes in Czechoslovakia;
for example, Hedda Zinner’s Studio 34 was heavily
influenced by Burian’s D34 and his voiceband recitation style.
Politically oriented artists and their troupes from other countries
also visited Czechoslovakia. Perhaps the best-known was Erika
Mann’s Swiss exile cabaret, The Peppermill (Die Pfeffermühle),
which performed its antifascist programs in Czechoslovakia in 1935
19
INTRODUCTION
54 Brigitte Dalinger, “Jiddisches Theater—Ein Grenzgänger zwischen den Sprachen
und Kulturen,” Maske und Kothurn 47(3–4) (2002): 89–100, see 92, 96.
55 The Young Jewish Stage of Brno (Jungjüdische Bühne Brünn), which identified
itself as a “German-language literary theater with Zionism as a doctrine,”
remained open from 1929 to 1935. The Jewish Chamber Theater (Jüdischen
Kammerspiele), established in Prague in 1935 and performing in German, lasted
only a few months. See Ursula Stamberg, “Das Theaterleben der Jüdischen
Bevölkerung Brünns,” Maske und Kothurn 47(3–4) (2002): 67–81, see 78; and
Dalinger, “Jiddisches Theater”: 98.
56 According to laws of the time, theaters with fewer than 50 seats did not need
a license.
and 1936.57 The threat of National Socialism eventually led
democratically minded Czech- and German-speaking artists to
collaborate. The Club of Czech and German Stage Artists (Klub
der tschechischen und deutschen Bühnenkünstler) was founded in
Prague in 1936 and branches were established in Ostrava/Ostrau
and Brno/Brünn. However, rising tensions between Czech and
German speakers in Czechoslovakia became increasingly difficult to
resolve as Hitler’s power grew and as more and more German
speakers in the border regions began to demand that the
Sudetenland be annexed to Nazi Germany.
Austria and Czechoslovakia soon ceased to be a safe havens for
Jewish artists. Austria was absorbed into the German Reich in
the so-called Anschluss (annexation) on March 12, 1938. On
September 30, 1938, representatives of England, France, and Italy
signed the Munich Pact, yielding to Hitler’s demand to link the
Sudetenland to the Reich. On March 15, 1939, the German army
invaded the remainder of Czech territory, and Bohemia and
Moravia became a German-administered “Protectorate.”58 The
occupation had begun.
Emigration was still possible after the Anschluss and from the
Protectorate. There were approximately 206,000 Jews “by race”
living in Austria in March 1938. By the end of November 1939,
over 126,000 had emigrated, but the outbreak of war severely
curtailed further opportunities to leave.59 By June 1941, due to
emigration and deportations, there were only 44,000 Jews left in
Vienna. Almost half were over 60 years of age, and two-thirds were
LISAPESCHEL
20
57 Romana Bečvová, “‘Beteiligt euch—es geht um eure Erde’. Erika Manns
politisch-satirisches Kabarett ‘Die Pfeffermühle’ in der Tschechoslowakei,”
Brücken: Germanistisches Jahrbuch Tschechien–Slowakei 16 (2008): 229–50.
58 Czechoslovakia lost most of its Silesian territory when the Sudetenland was
ceded to Nazi Germany. In March 1939, Slovakia became a nominally independent
state and Subcarpathian Ruthenia became a Hungarian territory.
59 Nevertheless, another 24,500 managed to emigrate even during the war. See
Botz, “The Dynamics of Persecution in Austria,” p. 206.
women.60 In March 1939, there were approximately 118,000
people in the Protectorate classified as Jews according to the Nazi
racial laws; only 26,000 of them managed to emigrate before mass
deportations began in the fall of 1941.61 Those who remained represented
a fairly normal distribution of age and gender.
THE TEREZÍN/THERESIENSTADT GHETTO, 1941–45
The Terezín/Theresienstadt ghetto served several functions in the
Nazis’ plans to exterminate the European Jews: as a transit camp,
where Jews from several countries were gathered before being
sent on to slave-labor and death camps; as a destination to which
elderly and privileged Jews were deported; as a decimation camp,
where thousands of prisoners died of “natural causes;” and as a
“model ghetto” that the Nazis displayed to visitors from organizations
such as the International Red Cross. The relative importance
of these functions evolved over the course of the war, and changes
in priorities affected all aspects of life in the ghetto, from the mortality
rate to the cultural life.
The first prisoners in the Terezín/Theresienstadt ghetto were
Jews from Bohemia and Moravia. In October 1941, representatives
of the Prague Jewish Community, forced into negotiations
with the Nazis, were made to suggest a location for a Jewish
ghetto. Jewish leaders did not favor Terezín/Theresienstadt
because it was far too small to hold the almost 80,000 Jews who
remained in the Protectorate. However, when the Nazis selected
Terezín/Theresienstadt from among various possibilities, the leaders
hoped it would be a site where Jews could wait out the war, and
believed Nazi assurances that they would be allowed to run it as a
relatively independent Jewish town.62
21
INTRODUCTION
60 Niklas, “. . . die schönste Stadt der Welt,” p. 32.
61 Rothkirchen, “The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia,” p. 59.
62 Ruth Bondy, “Elder of the Jews”: Jakob Edelstein of Theresienstadt (New York:
Grove Press, 1989), p. 241.
The precise factors that led the Nazis to select Terezín/
Theresienstadt are not known, but the site offered one obvious
advantage: it was easy to guard. Terezín/Theresienstadt was established
as a fortress complex in the late eighteenth century to defend
what were then the northern borders of Austria against the
Prussians. From the air, the complex looks like two towns, separated
by the river Ohře/Eger, and each surrounded by massive,
star-shaped fortress walls. The smaller of the two, called the Small
Fortress, was already in use by the summer of 1940 as a Gestapo
prison, mainly for political dissidents.63 The Large Fortress, selected
as the location for the ghetto, held a peacetime population of
7,000 to 8,000 soldiers and civilians. In the fall of 1941, thousands
of Czech civilians were still living there.
PHASE I: IMPRISONMENT IN THE BARRACKS
The Prague Jewish Community, ordered to prepare Terezín/
Theresienstadt to house thousands of prisoners, sent transports of
young men there on November 24 and December 4, 1941. The
Nazis promised that those who had “volunteered” for these socalled
AK I and AK II transports (from German Aufbaukommando,
literally “building commando”) would receive certain benefits
(weekends at home, the transfer of their salaries to their families,
etc.) which, however, never materialized. The core of the
Jewish leadership of the ghetto, the so-called Ältestenrat, arrived
with the transport of December 4. The Ältestenrat was headed by
the Judenältester, Jakob Edelstein, the former deputy head of the
Jewish community. As the members of AK I had already realized,
the reality the leaders faced was markedly different from that the
Nazis had promised. Rather than running an independent city,
they would report to a Nazi commandant while taking on the
LISAPESCHEL
22
63 Jews who were sent to the Small Fortress as political dissidents or for violating
rules in the ghetto were treated much more harshly than the other prisoners.
See, for example, the narrative of the Catholic priest Josef Miklík, Vzpomínky z
Terezína (Prague: C.A.T., 1945).
overwhelming responsibility of day-to-day operations of the ghetto.
This responsibility, however, gave Jewish leaders some room to
maneuver in terms of trying to create a livable situation for the
prisoners during what they all expected to be a very short war.
In the first period of the ghetto’s history, which lasted from its
founding till June 1942, only Jews from Bohemia and Moravia
were deported to Terezín/Theresienstadt. During this period, the
non-Jewish civilian population still lived in their homes but contact
with them was strictly forbidden. The Jewish inmates were
imprisoned in several large barracks. They left only for work,
guarded by Czech gendarmes, former members of the Czechoslovak
army whom the SS hired for most duties that involved
direct contact with the prisoners. According to survivor testimony,
most, but not all, gendarmes behaved decently towards them,
treating them as fellow Czechs.
Shortly after the first transports arrived, a separate women’s
barracks was established and visits between men and women were
forbidden. Families were divided; younger children and girls lived
with their mothers, and boys aged 12 and older lived in the men’s
barracks. Separate children’s rooms were soon established in the
barracks and instructors from the Zionist youth movements were
placed in charge of them.
The most shocking events to take place during this period
were the executions carried out in January and February, 1942.
Sixteen men who had violated prohibitions by trying to send letters
to their families and buy food in the Terezín/Theresienstadt
shops were sentenced to death by hanging. These were the only
executions carried out in the ghetto itself. Later offenders were
punished by being transferred to the Small Fortress, where most of
them perished.
Jews of the Protectorate had hoped that they would at least
stay in their own country, but in vain. Already in January 1942,
transports began to leave Terezín/Theresienstadt. Their destination
was not revealed. The prisoners only knew that the trains headed
east. They lived in fear of these deportations to the unknown, even
23
INTRODUCTION
though, until the very end of the war, very few knew the full truth
about extermination camps and gas chambers.64
The first cultural activities of the ghetto—simple and improvised
programs of songs, poems, and sketches—began to take
place in the barracks immediately after the first transports of prisoners
arrived. Jewish leaders, apparently in an attempt to legalize
these performances and ensure that prisoners would not be punished
for them, requested and received permission from the Nazi
commandant. They announced in the Daily Orders of December
28, 1941, that Kamaradschaftsabende (friendship evenings) could
be held on the condition that the program be submitted in advance
for approval.65 As the cultural activities continued to expand,
the Jewish leadership decided, in February 1942, to establish an
administrative body to oversee them. They appointed as director
of the new Freizeitgestaltung (Office for the Administration of
Leisure Time) a young rabbi named Erich Weiner.66
PHASE II: CREATING THE “MODEL GHETTO”
After the last members of the civilian population left Terezín/
Theresienstadt, the second phase of the ghetto’s history began. On
July 6, 1942, the barracks were opened, and the prisoners occupied
the entire area inside the Large Fortress, except the buildings
and spaces occupied by the SS.67 The ghetto was guarded from the
outside by the Czech gendarmes. Inside Terezín/Theresienstadt,
the Ghettowache, a police force manned by the prisoners themselves,
enforced rules and maintained order.
LISAPESCHEL
24
64 See, for example, the testimony of Rabbi Dr. Richard Feder, Židovská
tragedie: Dějství poslední (Kolín: Lusk, 1947), pp. 103–4.
65 This order is quoted in Eva Šormová, Divadlo v Terezíně 1941/1945 (Ustí nad
Labem: Severoceské nakladatelství, 1973), p. 22.
66 Bondy, “Elder of the Jews,” p. 291. For an account written by Weiner himself,
see “Freizeitgestaltung in Theresienstadt,” pp. 209–17.
67 Fewer than 30 members of the SS were assigned to Terezín/Theresienstadt
during the whole time of the ghetto’s existence. See Tomáš Fedorovič, “Neue
Erkenntnisse über die SSAngehörigen im Ghetto Theresienstadt,” in Jaroslava
Milotová, Michael Wögerbauer, and Anna Hájková (eds.), Theresienstädter Studien
und Dokumente 2006 (Prague: Sefer, 2007), pp. 234–50, see p. 236.
During the day, the prisoners were allowed to move about the
town, but an evening curfew was strictly enforced. Men and
women still lived separately, but visits were now allowed. Most
children now lived in specially established children’s homes in
separate barracks. The education of Jewish children was formally
banned, but their caretakers were supposed to keep them occupied
with singing, games, crafts, and cultural activities. In practice,
the cultural activities often constituted a curriculum that varied
widely, based on the values of each instructor. As Ruth Bondy
describes, “Every instructor educated his class (about forty children)
in his image, and according to his world view: graduates of
the Zionist youth movement did it in the spirit of Zionism;
Communists looked toward a socialist revolution; Czech nationalists,
toward love of the homeland.”68
In the summer of 1942, the character of Terezín/
Theresienstadt changed again as Jews from other countries were
deported to the ghetto. The first transport from Berlin arrived on
June 2, 1942. Transports from German cities continued to arrive
for months.69 The basic composition of the population changed,
in terms not only of nationality but also of age: the German-Jewish
prisoners were substantially older than Czech-Jewish prisoners.
Many of them had been told that Terezín/ Theresienstadt was a spa
town where they could live out their days in comfort if they agreed
to sign a housing contract that ceded all their property to the
Reich. Almost all the Austrian Jews were deported from Vienna
during a four-month period. From June 21 to October 10, 1942,
13 transports brought almost 14,000 prisoners; their average age
was 69.70
Completely unprepared for the conditions in which they
found themselves, the elderly German and Austrian Jews quickly
68 Bondy, “Elder of the Jews,” p. 310.
69 Karel Lagus and Josef Polák, Město za mřížemi (Prague: Naše vojsko, 1964),
pp. 337–41.
70 After January 1943, a further 1,340 Austrian Jews were deported. See
Niklas, “. . . die schönste Stadt der Welt,” p. 90.
25
INTRODUCTION
succumbed to exhaustion, hunger, illness, and despair. The mortality
rate, which until that point had seldom exceeded 10 per day,
increased drastically. Almost 4,000 prisoners died in the month of
September 1942 alone, when the ghetto temporarily reached an
unsustainable maximum population of almost 60,000 prisoners.71
By the end of 1942, the rising mortality rate and further outgoing
transports had reduced the population to an extremely overcrowded
but sustainable level of between 40,000 and 50,000
prisoners. In January 1943, Dr. Paul Epstein from Berlin was
appointed the new Judenältester. Edelstein and later Otto Zucker
continued to represent Czech-Jewish interests as members of the
Ältestenrat.
Although circumstances in the ghetto had stabilized somewhat
by the end of 1942 and prisoners were allowed to move
about freely in the town—which represented a vast improvement
over confinement in the barracks—living conditions remained
harsh. People were cramped into barracks and civilian homes,
sleeping on roughly hewn wooden bunks, with only a small shelf
for personal items. There was no privacy. Food, prepared by the
“royalty” of the ghetto—the cooks—in several large kitchens, was
distributed according to the prisoner’s age and type of work
(young people and those assigned to manual labor received
increased rations). Lack of water was a grave problem. The capacity
of the local waterworks, built to sustain a city of less than
10,000, could not meet the needs of a population four to five
times that number. Showering was rationed by a ticket system;
maintaining a basic level of hygiene was difficult; fleas, lice, and
bedbugs plagued the prisoners and increased the danger of
epidemics.
Tensions among the prisoners made the situation worse. For
example, some of the Protectorate Jews resented the German and
Austrian prisoners for overpopulating “their” ghetto; the newcomers
resented Czech control of some of the more advantageous
LISAPESCHEL
26
71 Ludmila Chládková, The Terezín Ghetto (Prague: Naše vojsko, 1991), p. 48.
IMAGE 1.1 An organizational chart of the Freizeitgestaltung after June 1943.
Divisions K/31–5 are German theater, Czech theater, cabaret, and the
Blockveranstaltungen.
Courtesy of the Terezín Memorial.
27
INTRODUCTION
LISAPESCHEL
28 jobs, especially those associated with the food supply. The diversity
of the ghetto increased further in 1943 when transports from
Holland and Denmark began to arrive as well. Pre-war class
tensions also carried over into the ghetto and were exacerbated
by structures of privilege. Certain prisoners, for instance, were
designated by the SS or by Jewish leaders as “prominent,” and
given preferential treatment, including better housing and
increased rations.72 Although many prisoners realized that both
the national and class tensions were deliberately encouraged by the
Nazis to keep them divided against each other, this realization was
not enough to keep the tensions at bay.
Perhaps the most traumatic event during this phase of the
ghetto’s existence was the census. In November 1943, when irregularities
were discovered in the population records, Edelstein was
accused of hiding evidence of escapes. He was arrested and, on
November 11, 1943, almost 40,000 people were made to march
out of the ghetto onto a nearby field. They were forced to stand
outside through the entire cold and damp day, not sure if they were
to be counted or killed. Many prisoners died of exposure and of
resulting illnesses in the weeks that followed.73
In spite of these hardships, Terezín/Theresienstadt cannot be
classified among the most terrible extermination and slave-labor
camps that the Nazis built. Although all adult prisoners were obligated
to work and a small number of them were assigned to workshops
manufacturing goods for the German war effort, most were
occupied in jobs that supported the daily operations of the ghetto.
72 The “prominent” prisoners in the ghetto were divided into two groups. Group
A was named by the SS; these were usually internationally known individuals or
former German military officers and their families. Group B was named by the
Ältestenrat and approved by the SS; most were professors and representatives
of Jewish organizations. See Daniela Řepová, “Emil Utitz a Terezín,” in Jaroslava
Milotová and Anna Lorencová (eds.), Terezínské studie a dokumenty 2003
(Prague: Sefer, 2003), pp. 169–212, see p. 184.
73 For details, see Bondy, “Elder of the Jews,” pp. 398–9, and H. G. Adler,
Theresienstadt: das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft (Göttingen: Wallstein,
2005), pp. 158–61.
29
INTRODUCTION
Although over 33,000 prisoners died in the ghetto, there were no
gas chambers. In the small crematorium outside the fortress walls
their bodies were burned and their ashes placed in individual cardboard
urns, which their loved ones hoped to take home after the
war. The prisoners were not confronted in Terezín/Theresienstadt
with the horror of mechanized mass murder—a horror that many
of them faced after their deportation to other camps.
A slow improvement in living conditions was due in part to a
new role assigned to the ghetto by the Nazi propaganda machine.
In November 1942, the International Committee of the Red
Cross, prompted by the World Jewish Congress, began requesting
permission to inspect the concentration camps. After 466 Danish
Jews were deported to Terezín/Theresienstadt in October 1943,
Danish officials also asked to see the ghetto.74 The Nazis realized
that a carefully orchestrated visit could help them refute reports
on the true situation in the camps. Berlin officials agreed to an
inspection, but Terezín/Theresienstadt was first thoroughly prepared
for its role as a “Jewish settlement area.”75
The most fruitful months of the cultural life occurred during
a period of relative stability in the ghetto, between November 1942
and September 1944.76 Several “stores” had been opened in September
1942 that offered an extremely limited selection of goods
and services. Nevertheless they made the ghetto seem slightly less
prison-like.77 In December 1942, a “coffeehouse” was established
where prisoners, according to a ticket system, could sit for a few
hours with a cup of chicory coffee and listen to music played by
74 Bondy, “Elder of the Jews,” pp. 340, 391.
75 The Nazis began to use this term in March 1944. See Anna Hyndráková,
Raisa Machatková, and Jaroslava Milotová (eds.), Acta Theresiania, sv. 1: Denní
rozkazy Rady starších a Sdělení židovské samosprávy Terezín 1941–1945
(Prague: Sefer, 2003), pp. 448, 226ff.
76 Outgoing transports did not cease during this period. In May 1944, for
instance, transports sent more than 7,500 prisoners to Auschwitz to ensure that
Terezín did not look overpopulated.
77 See Verschleißstellen (glossary); Bondy, “Elder of the Jews,” pp. 324, 333;
and Hyndráková et al., Acta Theresiania, p. 226.
their fellow prisoners.78 Now that public spaces had been established
and the prisoners were no longer confined to their barracks,
cultural undertakings took on a more public character as well.79
They were allowed to function and, later in this period, even
actively supported by the Nazis in accordance with their propaganda
plans. However, they sprang, above all, from the needs of
IMAGE 1.2 The census on November 11, 1943. By F. Bloch.
Courtesy of Yad Vashem.
78 Chládková, Terezín Ghetto, p. 48.
79 Bořivoj Srba, “Divadlo za mřížemi: Projevy české divadelní tvořivosti v
pracovních, internačních a koncentračních táborech a věznicích nacistické
Třetí říše,” Divadelní revue 6(1) (1995): 9–27, see 11.
31
INTRODUCTION
the prisoners themselves. A sample of the offerings for February
1943 provides an idea of the diversity of identities, loyalties, and
affinities served by the Freizeitgestaltung’s programming:
• Concerts: Jewish liturgical music, opera arias, Journey
though the Land of Music (premiere), Raphael Schächter’s
Hebrew Choir (premiere)—20 performances altogether.
• Operas: The Bartered Bride, Rigoletto (premiere, the cultural
department’s anniversary performance), The Marriage of
Figaro (premiere)—10 performances altogether.
• Theater: Wolker’s The Tomb (premiere); a revue,
Youngsters not Admitted (premiere); a cabaret within the
framework of Stolen Theater; Cocteau’s The Human Voice;
opera evening; Thoren’s Cabaret with Skits; evening of
songs from Erben’s Flower Bouquet; puppet theater;
Women’s Dictatorship—50 performances altogether.80
The theater offerings on this list, performed on various small
stages around the ghetto, reveal the wide variety of the prisoner’s
national, linguistic, cultural, and even political affiliations. For
example, the author of The Tomb (Hrob), Jiří Wolker (1900–24),
was a Czech avant-garde writer who had been adopted by the
communists as one of their own. Youngsters not Admitted (Für
Jugendliche Verboten) was an evening of slightly racy comic songs
and sketches in German; and the Stolen Theater (Vyšlojzované
divadlo) was apparently named after the Liberated Theater of
Voskovec and Werich.81 Flower Bouquet (Kytice) by Karel Jaromír
Erben (1811–70) was a Czech classic from the National Revival
period, and Women’s Dictatorship (Diktatur der Frauen) was a
German-language three-act comedy from the early 1930s.82
80 Bondy, “Elder of the Jews,” p. 365.
81 Souvenir posters for The Tomb and for Youngsters not Admitted have been
preserved. The Stolen Theater appears in a list of Czech-language works performed
in the ghetto. See the Terezín Memorial, inv. nos. PT 4306, PT 3847, and
PT 3862.
82 See the Terezín Memorial, inv. nos. PT 4304 and PT 3845.
LISAPESCHEL
32 The Freizeitgestaltung continued to expand; an undated organizational
chart preserved in the Terezín Memorial lists more than
30 divisions, including German theater, Czech theater, cabaret,
opera and vocal music, instrumental music, lectures in different
languages, and chess and several sports, including soccer and table
tennis.83 In this period, the Freizeitgestaltung could officially
employ artists and thus spare them from other forms of labor. In
rare cases it even requested specific performers to be exempted
from outgoing transports.84 Its administrators scheduled the
limited number of available performance and rehearsal spaces, distributed
tickets, and submitted lists of works to the Nazis for censorship
before performance. Performances also continued to take
place in the barracks, outside of official channels.
A Stadtverschönerung (city beautification) in preparation for
the Red Cross inspection was ordered to begin in December 1943.
Throughout the spring of 1944 the renovation of the ghetto was
carried out, mostly through the labor of the prisoners themselves.85
The long-awaited visit of the commission, which included three
international representatives—two Danish and one Swiss—took
place on June 23, 1944. The visitors were accompanied by several
SS officers, representatives from the Reich Ministry of
International Affairs and from the German Red Cross. The only
prisoner included in the contingent was Judenältester Epstein, who
had received the title of “mayor” for the day and was only allowed
to speak with the members of the commission in the presence
of the SS. They followed a prepared path through Terezín/
Theresienstadt with stops at the bakery, the bank, a performance of
the children’s opera Brundibár, and a few more sites of interest.86
The members of the commission, in spite of certain doubts,
83 See the Terezín Memorial, inv. no. PT 3768.
84 See, for example, the “protection lists” and requests to remove individual
artists and their families from scheduled transports in the Theresienstadt
Collection, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, file O.64/23.
85 Chládková, Terezín Ghetto, p. 50.
86 Adler, Theresienstadt, pp. 172–8.
33
INTRODUCTION
expressed their general approval of the standard of living in the
ghetto. Dr. M. Rossel, the Swiss representative, expressed surprise
in his official report over the long delay in granting the Red Cross
request to visit Terezín/Theresienstadt, since there was clearly
nothing to hide.87
Apparently inspired by the success of the visit, the Nazis created
a “documentary” film about the ghetto. Prisoner Kurt Gerron,
a well-known German-Jewish actor and director of the inter-war
period, was ordered to direct it.88 A partially edited version of the
film, created from the footage shot in August and September
1944, has been preserved, and offers a last glimpse of hundreds of
prisoners.
At the end of September 1944, the period of relative stability
came abruptly to an end. A wave of transports from September 28
to October 28 carried away 18,000 people, including the majority
of prisoners of productive working age and almost all the active
participants in the cultural life of the ghetto. Epstein was arrested
and executed, most members of the Ältestenrat were deported, and
Rabbi Dr. Benjamin Murmelstein, a leader of the Viennese Jewish
community, became the new Judenältester.
PHASE III: AFTER THE MASS TRANSPORTS
After these transports, the ghetto entered its last phase of existence.
Only 11,000 prisoners remained, many of them elderly and ill.
Those who were healthy and capable of work—mostly women—
struggled to manage the most essential operations of the ghetto.
The situation began to stabilize at the end of 1944. Incoming
transports continued. Jews from Hungary and Slovakia arrived in
87 Bondy, “Elder of the Jews,” p. 439.
88 Karel Margry, “Das Konzentrationslager als Idylle: Theresienstadt: Ein
Dokumentar-Film aus dem Jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet,” in Fritz Bauer Institut
(ed.), Auschwitz. Geschichte, Rezeption und Wirkung: Jahrbuch 1996 zur
Geschichte und Wirkung des Holocaust (Frankfurt and New York: Campus,
1996), pp. 319–52.
LISAPESCHEL
34 the ghetto along with the last Czech, German, and Austrian Jews
who had been protected until then for being married to “Aryans.”
Slowly, even the cultural life began to revive. It was clear that the
war would end soon and all thoughts and hopes were pinned on
that moment.
Nazi leaders, also aware of the impending defeat, negotiated
the release of some of the prisoners to neutral countries. One thousand,
two hundred were sent by train to Switzerland in February
1945, and the Danish Jews were released on April 15 to the
Swedish Red Cross.89 The ghetto, however, faced a last, terrible
trial: on April 20, 1945, death marchers began to arrive in Terezín/
Theresienstadt—starved and ill, narrating horrific accounts of their
experiences. Some of the Terezín/Theresienstadt prisoners died
just days before, or shortly after, the liberation, from illnesses they
contracted while nursing these prisoners.
The last days of the ghetto were marked by chaotic events as
the SS lost their power over the prisoners’ lives and the Red Cross
took over administration of Terezín/Theresienstadt. On May 3,
1945, the SS stopped trying to prevent escapes, and on May 4, a
group of Czech doctors and nurses arrived to help battle the
typhus epidemic that had broken out after the arrival of the death
marchers. The next day the last of the SS officers left. On May 8,
Soviet tanks, on their way to Prague, went through Terezín/
Theresienstadt. The ghetto was liberated.90 Two days later the
Soviets took control and began repatriating the prisoners, but
when the typhus epidemic could not be brought under control,
they imposed a two-week quarantine. Repatriation resumed at
the end of May. The last of the former prisoners left Terezín/
Theresienstadt in August 1945.91
89 For an account of the Swiss transport see Vojtěch Blodig, “Poslední fáze ve
vývoji terezínského ghetta,” in Vojtěch Blodig and Miroslav Karný (eds.), Terezín
v konečném řešení židovské otázky (Prague: Logos, 1992), pp. 182–90, see pp.
185–6.
90 Ibid., p. 190.
91 Chládková, Terezín Ghetto, p. 53.
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INTRODUCTION
Of the approximately 15,000 Austrian Jews deported to Terezín/
Theresienstadt, only about 1,700 survived in the ghetto or in other
camps.92 Of the approximately 74,000 Jews deported from
Bohemia and Moravia, about 7,000 were liberated in the ghetto;
of those who were deported “to the east,” that is, to various concentration
and slave-labor camps, only about 3,000 returned.93
92 Niklas, “. . . die schönste Stadt der Welt,” p. 150.
93 Of the 7,000 Czech Jews liberated in the ghetto, just over half had been
deported in the last months of the war. See Rothkirchen, “The Jews of Bohemia
and Moravia,” pp. 59–60.