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Pavel Fantel (1903-1945), Story hour 1942-1945, Watercolor on cardboard
Gift of the Prague Committee for Documentation,Courtesy of Alisa Shek, Israel
Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum
n the barracks the children lived under the authority of the leaders. How much was this framework able to serve as a substitute for the family unit and which jobs did the leaders take upon themselves? We will study this through the eyes of the children and the way in which they expressed themselves as they described their leaders
Activity
Read the next 3 sources. Afterwards, fill out the graph.
Source A: The Czech Girls' Home
"Today is Mother's Day. The girls have been so excited about making presents for their mothers. I felt terribly strange. My parents are in Palestine. I thought that on this special day, I should give a present to the person who I feel is almost like my mother, and that is exactly how I feel about Mrs. Milstein and Tela. For a year and a half, they have looked after me like mothers, why shouldn't I repay them? I want to be like them. I have prepared little presents for them. I had a strange feeling when I saw Mrs. Milstein sitting at the table! I approached her slowly, and finally gave her the present, adding a sweet kiss, and ran away. I saw that she was surprised and pleased. I was a hundred times happier than she was. I went to Tela, trembling all over. I wished her well and began to cry. Suddenly I felt so good. I will never be able to forget Mother's Day in Theresienstadt."
R.S., 13 years old, heim 28
In Their Footsteps - A Visitor's Guide to Terezin, (Heb.), p. 13
Source B: Jewish Education in the Ghetto
March 17, 1942
"In the evening, there was a talk with the female counselors. I lectured for almost a full hour, but the counselors were so tired, they did not pay the kind of attention to the lecture that I usually require. I wanted to start a debate on Jewish education but failed. I hope I will succeed next time. What do you tell a child that steals coal? The child sees everyone stealing and loses all sense of morality."
Redlich, The Theresienstadt Diary of Gonda Redlich, p. 28
Source C: The Betreuers*
Issue No. 2, November 5, 1943
I'm thinking about what to write and all of a sudden an idea pops into my mind. I'll tell you all about the madrichim - the Betreuers*. The central figure in our Home is Georg Frankl. He is very strict with us. But he is able to get us anything we need, from an alarm clock to closets. As it turns out, he hates dirt. On November 1, at ten minutes past eight, a moment arrived that everyone will always remember. The mess was supposed to be tidied up in five minutes. I won't say any more about [the madrich] Jerka, and I'll go on to Rita. Tidiness and other things are taken care of by the Betreuers, one of whom is Rita. Like most women, she rules moderately and in that she is not exceptional. Nu, and now it's Pepa's turn; he is all over the place and stays in each place for just a minute. The ladies Drarova and Flosrova are responsible for the cooking. The manager of the Pischkollonne is Aunt Annie, whose broom we took, but when she said that she wouldn't make Ordnung [order], we gave it back to her voluntarily. See you in the next bulletin.
Midalias.
*The caretakers. The educators were called madrichim and the caretakers were called Betreuers. Bondy, They Called It Friend, (Heb.), p. 70
In Column A, write the name of the madrich or madricha whom the text refers to. In Column B, indicate which figure, in your opinion, they are replacing: a father, a mother, a grandfather, a brother, disciplinarians, storytellers, friends or teacher etc. In Column C, indicate whether, in your opinion, the madrichim succeeded in providing the child with a sense of the figure they were replacing.
| The madrich or madricha (name if there is one) | The figure that the madrich or madricha is replacing | Does the madrich or madricha provide a sense of the missing figure? |
|---|---|---|
For the teacher
In Theresienstadt many children lived together in their own barracks.
The spirit of the youth movements served as a basis for the life in the barracks. In these barracks, the children were under the authority of their leaders, who, in many cases, were only a few years older than the children.
The Zionist ideology assumed a central position in these frameworks. The Zionist madrichim worked on promoting Zionist and pioneering values to the children. This world-view was foreign to many of them since they came from assimilated homes. Nevertheless, other ideological groups - political and religious - were active, reflecting various sectors of Czech Jewry and other groups in the ghetto.
The need to protect the children from the difficult reality in the ghetto led the Jewish leadership to separate the children from their parents. By doing so, they created an alternative to family life. The madrichim were responsible for the daily routine and the activities in the children's homes. Moreover, since the family framework had largely been dismantled, intimate emotions such as love, anger, and dependence, which had formerly been directed at the parents, were now directed at the madrichim.
For the Teacher
A substitute figure can often try to take the place of the person who is absent. Sometimes he/she can console and give hope, but he/she can never be that person. In fact, he/she often intensifies the pain created by the absence of the person.
Summary
Theresienstadt was not a ghetto in the ordinary sense of the word. It served as both ghetto and transit camp from which thousands were deported to concentration and extermination camps. Men, women and children were forced to deal with a daily reality of life in the shadow of death. They tried to keep the family framework despite the separation between the members of the family. They were forced to fight in order to get a bit of food, and in order to protect their privacy and preserve their humanity. The actual life in Theresienstadt, and not what the Nazis falsely presented, becomes more clear through reading the testimonies and stories of the children of Theresienstadt. The voice of the children shows us about how this place served as a source of life and hope alongside the pain, the loss and death.
Out of the 15,000 children that were in Theresienstadt, about 150 survived.
In these activities you read a variety of testimonies from the Theresienstadt ghetto that tell the story of the children in the Ghetto.
Yehuda Bacon describes through his dream the incredible distance between the home before the war, Theresienstadt, and Auschwitz:
"In Theresienstadt we dreamed ….I dreamt that I was back home, I dreamt that I would meet friends from class …. When we came to Auschwitz, we never dreamed about home anymore. The biggest dream was Theresienstadt".