MEMOIRS

that he slept in his mother’s arms almost every night in their cramped cellblock. I lived under the protecting veil of my mother and so cannot describe the darker side of our lives in the concentration camp. Not once did she allow me to see the humiliations and insults she had to suffer ... she [created] a joyful and ‘normal’ environment around me that had little to do with the reality in which we lived ... my early childhood seemed to me happy and utterly normal. So did the Jews around Herz-Sommer, many of them from Prague, walk to their deaths like lambs? I think not. There are plenty of books, such as Samuel Pisar’s, on how the Germans terrified and paralysed their Jewish subjects with an accelerating series of laws and deprivations buttressed by severe and prompt punishments, notably shooting, for those who wavered even slightly from total obedience. Auschwitz itself was literally a deadly secret. A halfJewish engineer had been transported there from Theresienstadt; because of his skills he was then transferred on to a slave labour camp. But he had seen what was happening at Auschwitz. Escaping from the labour camp, this hero bribed a Czech guard to let him back into Theresienstadt and told what he knew to Leo Baeck, a much respected German rabbi and one of the leaders of the Council of Elders, whose responsibilities included choosing inmates for transport to Auschwitz where, unknown to the Elders, they would be gassed. Baeck, ‘the spiritual leader of the German Jews during the Nazi period’, made an extraordinary decision: ‘In the end,’ he wrote later, ‘I decided that no one should know. If I told the Council of Elders, within minutes the story would be around the entire camp. To live in the expectation of death by gas would make life only more difficult; and there was no certainty of this death.’ Some might say that Baeck deprived the Jews of a chance to rise up and perhaps die fighting. After the war, Herz-Sommer travelled the two hours back to Theresienstadt to ask Baeck, who was still there, for help. What was on her mind was the anti-Semitism of the Czechs in Prague. Baeck’s murmured response was, ‘Maybe there are too many Jews in the world.’ That response ‘pierced Alice like an arrow’ and she fled the room. Not long thereafter she was informed that her husband had died of typhus at Dachau. On 1 February 2003 one of the crew on the Space Shuttle Columbia was the Israeli Ilan Ramon. He was carrying a mysterious drawing, ‘Moon Landscape’, which he had obtained from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. The shuttle exploded re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. Everybody and everything was destroyed. The drawing was by Petr Ginz. Petr Ginz was certainly no meek lamb. Aged fourteen, he began a slim but poignant diary of his daily life

in Prague under the German occupation and then in Theresienstadt, and kept it until just before he was sent to Auschwitz, where he was murdered. The diary is especially touching because it records a special teenager having fun, teasing his friends, reading Thomas Mann, Dickens, Jules Verne and Oscar Wilde, writing five novels, and creating the evocative drawings and paintings reproduced in the diary. But he also recorded, sometimes in a special cipher, his observations of the Nazis and the anti-Semitic Czechs. For example, 20 April 1942: ‘Hitler is fifty-three years old ... Every building has to hang out a swastika flag, except for Jews, of course, who are not allowed this pleasure.’ As Petr’s sister, Chava Pressburger (who was reunited with her brother at Theresienstadt – which she survived – and found the diary after her brother was taken to Auschwitz), says in her edited version, ‘Petr presents all the facts in a dry manner, without expressing emotions, without demonstrating worry, fear, or hate.’ Pressburger notes what is also plain in the Herz-Sommer diary: the Nazi method of very gradually restricting freedom, adding laws and regulations, and listing things to give up. In Petr’s diary people disappear, help each other pack, suddenly are not in school – which functions normally, with teachers handing out normal penalties (Petr notes when he receives them). Even as changes become apparent, normal life seems to continue: after writing that he has been thrown off a tram because he is a Jew, Petr records the same day that he received very high marks in school. Pressburger recounts a Red Cross visit to Theresienstadt. ‘They happily allowed themselves to be cheated by the Nazis and made no independent effort to find out about the real life of Theresienstadt inmates.’ The Red Cross team was led by a Dr Rossel, vice-president of the Red Cross in Berlin. He described a place where ‘people live happily’ and presented his photographs to the Germans for propaganda purposes. All the time, Pressburger states, the Red Cross had ‘authentic testimony’ from two men who had managed to escape Auschwitz and make their way to Geneva, where they described the exterminations. Britain and America, too, knew of these reports, but turned Jews away. To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 37

Alice: played for survival

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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