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Fortress of My Youth: Memoir of a Terezín Survivor

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Renée was 13 years old when the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia. Born of Czech-speaking Jewish parents who lived in Josefov (Josephstadt), she had been baptized as child, but of course the Nazi race laws applied to the entire family (except to a much loved non-Jewish step-grandfather). For the next three years restriction followed restriction. During that time Renée kept a diary, which has certain elements in common with Anne Franks', recording all the passionate feelings of an adolescent girl, eventually cooped up with edgy parents in their home (which they had to share with a Yiddish-speaking family from Ruthenia), rebelling against her fate, fantasizing about being in love. She did in fact have a passionate and touching, mainly epistolatory, friendship with Jarmila, a non-Jewish girl two years older than herself whom she had met on a train. For sometimes Renée and her mother ran the risk of defying the Nazi restrictions on Jews leaving their neighbourhood and visited the grandparents in nearby Mnichovo Hradiste (Münchengrätz): in their house they could temporarily put their worries to the back of their minds and even sing and play - music had always meant much to the family.

More and more people were being ordered to report for deportation. The Nazis took the Ruthenian family without their two small children, aged four and 18 months, and fourteen-year old Renée took over the mothering of them. But then in December 1942 it was the turn of Renée and her family: they were deported to Theresienstadt (Terezin).

We know that the Nazis presented Theresienstadt as a `model camp' to visitors from the Red Cross. Did these take in the atrociously overcrowded accommodation, with well over 50,000 inmates in buildings that had been built for one-tenth of that number, so that each inmate had less than 1.6 square meters of floor-space? Did they take in its nature as a transit camp, from which thousands of people were transported to death camps to make room for thousands of newcomers? Did they notice the filthy conditions that prevailed in most of the camp? The tormenting infestation of bedbugs and lice? The carts which wheeled away the 100 to 150 dead each day (nearly 30,000 died there)?

And yet, in the midst of all this, there were remarkable affirmations of life. The Nazis left the detailed running of the camp to its inmates, and even gave permission for some children to be accommodated in separate buildings, which were run by the most wonderful men and women who made it their mission to stimulate and educate these children (often to a higher standard than they would have experienced at school), to give them as positive an attitude to life as was possible under these circumstances, to make them be as clean and tidy as possible, above all to inculcate into them a strong ethical sense, so that, for example, they would help each other and share the few small food parcels that were initially admitted from the outside.

As part of the `model camp' image, the Nazis permitted the inmates to stage concerts, choral works in the beginning, then instrumental music on instruments that had been confiscated. Famous musicians among the inmates insisted on the highest standards from ensembles who rehearsed after ten hours of hard labour in the fields or workshops and whose composition was constantly changing as the result of deportations. Renée herself took part in performances of Smetana's The Bartered Bride (with its opening chorus Let's rejoice, let's be merry) and The Kiss, and Verdi's Requiem.

So there were exhilarating experiences in Theresienstadt (and I was reminded of the title of another such memoir - A Garden of Eden in Hell - see my Amazon review). They included intense personal, often sexual, attachments between these adolescents, only too often violently ending when one of them was selected for further deportation. Renée herself experienced this: there was passionate love between her and a young man called Milan, who would leave Theresienstadt on the same transport as her father.

Renée's father and Milan were on one of the last transports out of Theresienstadt. She and her mother were due to go on one soon after, but by a miracle they were spared. And then there were no more transports. Only a few people, mostly women, were left in Theresienstadt to cope as best they could that winter until the Russians arrived to liberate the camp in May 1945.

It was a desolate return home - so many people had perished: her father and her beloved grandparents among them. Jarmila had been arrested, but released because she was dying of tuberculosis: Renée managed to see her on the day she died. Milan had survived the death march from his concentration camp, but did not marry Renée. When the Communists seized power in Czechoslovakia he had emigrated to Chile

Renée's mother had managed to re-establish the family business, which was lost for the second time when it was taken over by the State. Renée herself went to university. She had accidentally left a letter from Milan in a library book, in which Milan had made flippant remarks about the East and about his `capitalist' activities in Chile, which nearly cost her the right to sit her final examination. But the letter remained on her police files and would cause more problems in later years. She still lives in Prague - but she certainly could not have published the last chapter of her book if the Communists were still in power there.

A most memorable addition to the memoirs of Holocaust survivors.