My Years in Theresienstadt: How One Woman Survived the Holocaust by Gerty Spies

Author:Gerty Spies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-04-29T01:56:00+00:00

The hope-inspiring rumors increased: an attempt on Hitler's life! He received a small burn, to be sure, but he got away with his life. The Allied troops marched ever deeper into the country. They begrudged us this news, for us so heartening, but the secret friendship between some of the Czech gendarmes on guard duty and the Czech Jewish camp inmates was as reliable as newspapers (or even more reliable). Even hidden in the small packages from home, on the bottom of a bag of flour or baked within a cake, we found delirium inducing announcements of the progress toward our liberation. If only we might live to see it.

Like lightning out of the clear blue sky, the unforeseen order surprised us: "Start up the mica workshops. Beginning September 1-mica work again." And this time production was started on a grand scale. These last nine months were to exhaust all the bodily and spiritual strength that these bitter years had left still within us. Daily we died many a death from the torments of our souls, from fear, from bodily overexertion and spiritual oppression. And yet each woman and girl who was part of the mica work process was in fact very lucky. For soon thereafter a number of mass transports to Auschwitz started such as Theresienstadt had never experienced before. Thousands and thousands more got their orders for departure-we did not know to where-and under a firm, brilliant blue fall sky the preparations for these horrible mass murders were played out. Workers in the mica workshop were exempted from the transports, of course, only if the desired output was realized.

When fear of death, when threat of transport hangs over you, you learn to work. To be punctual to the second, no, to be early, not to lift your head, not to look away from your work, to concentrate your thoughts on this most dull, monotonous business which required absolutely no thought, just in order not to waste motion, just to split one more mica-slate, to be able to point to the required number of grams at weighingall that so as not to be part of the next transport like thousands of our companions in misfortune. Sweat poured, the heart beat hammerlike, hunger was gnawing-and our hands flew.

There were no free days, only changing shifts. Only a few hours were our own between sleep and work, between work and sleep, to lie by the water at the moat and to rest, unless we helped some other dear person pack, who was on her way to destruction. And this time the transports cleared out the city-Theresienstadt was empty. The streets so quiet, the houses so quiet. Our steps echoed. Our room also grew emptier. But who could be happy about space, considering how it was achieved? We all knew who paid for it.

Herta Levi was deported on one of these first transports. Shortly thereafter, it was Martha Geissmar's mother, and then Martha herself. Her precious violin, which she had smuggled miraculously

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