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The Art of Darkness

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Charlotte Opfermann was all of seven years old when the Nazis seized power in 1933. The daughter of a Jewish community leader in Wiesbaden, she was an intimate eyewitness to escalating persecution. Petty chicanery, legalized robbery, exclusion, vilification, violence, roundups, deportations, the life of the camps - these were the conditions of her childhood and her coming of age. She has forgotten nothing, forgiven nothing. She writes like an angry teenager and a very knowledgeable adult.
Maybe Anne Frank would have sounded like this, if she had lived...

These essays burn with Opfermann's determination to set the record straight, especially about life and death in the Theresienstadt concentration camp , the so called "model" camp, where her family was sent early in 1943. Recent books and performances have celebrated the permitted activity of Jewish painters, musicians, and actors at Theresienstadt, making the camp sound like an artists' colony - a notion Opfermann passionately refutes. She remembers in harsh detail -- hunger, disease, death and the terror of regular mass deportations from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, where her own father perished in 1944.
Unforgettable anecdotes - five Jewish schoolgirls steal a moment's happiness on a rare Sunday outing to the country in 1939 - and heartbreaking photographs --
Theresienstadt's youngest inmates cleaned and dressed up for the Red Cross inspection in June '44 (these same children would be killed just weeks later) - make this a memoir a dense, almost too dense compendium of fact and memory, statistics and rage.

Suzanne Ruta

Until I became interested in genealogy, I believed that
Theresienstadt was a model concentration camp for German
intellectuals, musicians, and artists, where children drew marvelous
pictures and composers wrote beautiful music. I knew it had been
inspected by the International Committee of the Red Cross and found
to be pretty much what the Nazis had said, where the Fuehrer had
given the Jews a city.

Then I tracked down my grandmother Clara and learned that she had
been on the first train of aged Berlin Jews to Theresienstadt. I dug
some more. The American Red Cross told me that she died in
Theresienstadt. She was not a writer; or a musician, not even an
intellectual. But she died 4 Mar 1943 at the age of 71. I learned
later that she probably starved to death.

I had become aware that Charlotte Opfermann had been in
Theresienstadt and asked her if I would be able to find a grave there
to put a stone on. She wrote back that, at first, Jews were buried,
but later they were cremated. She added the ghoulish detail that when
the Germans were trying to erase the traces of their crimes, they
forced the prisoners to hand the ashes from hand to hand to be dumped
in the River Eger and that some of the children saw the names of
their loved ones on the ashes they were disposing of. She also added
that some were happy that the citizens of Dresden would be drinking
water containing Jewish ashes. [Oh, Dresden! Poor innocent Dresden!
We must punish the British air marshal responsible for destroying
this peaceful, beautiful city with all its cultural treasures!]

The image of Theresienstadt started to change. But not until I read
Charlotte's new book, "The Art of Darkness," did I realize that she
is probably correct in assuming that Adolf Eichmann went to his death
with a smile on his face because he was responsible for that wrong
image of Theresienstadt which he inculcated. That was no Potemkin
ghetto, it was a murder factory.

Theresienstadt was anything but the model ghetto the Nazis portrayed.
It was a place of death, Jewish death, including the murder of
several people I knew of, such as Kurt Gerron, the man who played the
organ grinder in the "Three-Penny Opera" and was the first to sing
"Mack, the Knife."

They did not all die in Theresienstadt. My other grandmother, who was
on the second train out of Berlin, was later shipped to Auschwitz
where she won a short reprieve from the gas chambers thanks to a
revolt by the Gypsies. Ah, the wonders of genealogical research!

There's a wonderful mix of deep feeling, factual reportage & analysis and biting black humor in Charlotte Opfermann's "Art of Darkness" which provides a glimpse into uncommonly seen corners of the not-so-paradisiacal "Paradise Ghetto" Theresienstadt - -not just the much lauded art and music, but the hunger, the dirt and the death. Interesting details about the infamous Eichmann film which used inmates, who were murdered after this farce of a production, to portray a happy population enjoying a life full of art and culture. Opfermann also tells of life before and after Theresienstadt for the Jewish community in the Wiesbaden - Frankfurt area - -the persecutions of the 30s and deportations of the 40s, and the post-war return of the few survivors who meet with continued hostility from many of their former neighbors. And I can't end this review without mentioning Prof. Opfermann's fascinating discussion of the Theresienstad inspiration of Peter Weiss' brilliant play "Marat/Sade".
Very much recommended.

The haunting, monstrous image of a smilingly dying Eichmann will keep all righteous people aware of what happened, lest we ever forget.

Thanks Charlotte!

Well-written , truthfully expressed , this book lives up to it's title . Professor Opfermann would know , having lived through it . Her determination to involve the reader is underlying and at the same time , most welcome . Concise , correct and dignified , this piece of literature is exactly that . "The Art of Darkness" shows the path to the very heart of that darkness in a way which will leave you wanting to know more....more of the truth .