The Girls of Room 28 by Hannelore Brenner

Author:Hannelore Brenner [Brenner, Hannelore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8052-4270-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-08-27T04:00:00+00:00

“We’re expecting some kind of inspection from the outside world,” Helga wrote on November 29, 1943. “Everyone learned about it on the 27th. The entire ghetto is to be prettied up—the store windows, the barracks, and the children’s homes. Shelves have to be hidden behind curtains. Nothing is to be left lying in the open. We’re under quarantine. We’re allowed outside, but no one is allowed to visit us. Encephalitis has broken out, thirty cases, four of them ours.”

In Room 28 one bunk after the other stood empty, the sick bays were filled to their limit, and the Sokolovna was turned into a hospital for encephalitis cases. An inflammation of the brain, the disease is very infectious and results in both a high fever and narcolepsy, which is why it is also called sleeping sickness. There was hardly a girl who did not come down with it—Ela, Flaška, Handa, Helga, Frta, Marianne, Judith, Lenka, Hana, Hanka, Eva Winkler. One after the other they fell ill—as did the adults, and it was often worse for them than for the children. Tella suddenly could no longer move her fingers; it was as if she were paralyzed, and for a while she was absent from Room 28.

The disease caused great confusion and undermined the discipline that usually prevailed in the Girls’ Home. Even prohibitions were ignored. Because of the contagious nature of the disease, no one was allowed in the Girls’ Home except the residents, but this did not prevent a few boys from visiting their girlfriends.

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