I had started to try and tell the children who were in my charge about the outside world, about books I'd read. Many of these youngsters had been confined for three and four years--half their lives, had no idea what life could/might be like. All they knew was hunger, work (they had to work starting at age 10), filth, deportations, sickness, despair, how to steal food from other prisoners, scrounge in the garbage for eatables. There was a now famous theatrical production for Czech children prisoners being talked about "Brundibar." None of us had an opportunity to see it. It would have been meaningless, anyway, since it was done in Czech for Czech children. Very few of my German and Austrian charges understood that language. I spoke of the book by the German Jewish author E. Kaestner Emil and the Detectives and another book Die Schwarze Hand about a similar situation (Berlin street urchins doing unusual, heroic, courageous deeds and being rewarded). I have not been able to rediscover this book or remember the name of the author. The kids started to identify with some of the characters in my story, many of them made up and invented on the spur of the moment. It was our version of bedtime stories. And we'd play-act a little bit in order to explain those strange circumstances in the outside-free world. Finally, we said we'd improvise a full blown performance for the other children in our barracks and, afterwards, other friends. The manuscript and sketches I prepared for and about this play were taken away by our Soviet liberators at the end of the war. I hope to find it in the recently released documents from the former USSR at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum archives in Washington DC.
But I have, since that time, written a play about that play and the performances, for and with my American students. It has been read and performed, though not yet officially published. It was very difficult to go through with the actual performance (in 1944-45), because another group of adult performers had recently tried to stage the -now- famous "Emperor of Atlantis," also written in the camp, and they were discovered by the SS guards. All the members of that theatrical effort were deported and killed. The "Atlantis" opera was never performed until after the War. I did not wish to risk such an outcome for us. Rabbi Dr. Leo Baeck (from the internal Council of Elders) had heard about my work with this project. He summoned me to see him and I had to give him a complete description. He worried that I was putting myself and the children in harm's way, because our barracks was just a few paces away from the main SS administrative offices. There were frequent inspections, control visits of our premises. He finally approved and even came to attend our first performance.
At the end of the War things were almost worse. There were 18,000 recently arrived deathmarch victims from other camps in our midst, badly in need of help and care. These people were even worse off than we, having been brought on foot and --some-- by cattle car to our camp - most often without food or water. One evening I helped unload one of these cars - there were more dead than alive people "on board." And the few living were very ill. Our housing and food supply situation was inadequate to the task. We did not have nurses or care givers. There was an outbreak of typhus.
[After the war,] I returned to my home town in hopes that my father and brother might have survived. They hadn't.
My father, brother, grandfathers were killed, also many uncles, aunts, cousins, friends, neighbors; my grandmother elected suicide rather than face deportation. Interesting vignette: during one scholarly conference in this country, a couple of years ago, a very knowledgeable rabbi and Holocaust scholar made a categorical statement "Jews don't commit suicide." Maybe it is against scripture--but, as a matter of actual fact: fully half the graves at my home town's Jewish cemetery from 1938 (i.e. Kristallnacht) until the end of the WWII are those of suicide victims. My Mother survived the camp, but she was never well again and died some years later.
