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6 Theresienstadt On June 30, 1943, after two (or three) weeks in one of Hannover’s prisons, we were brought to a small railroad station and put into a freight train. Father told us that we had been imprisoned because the Gestapo thought that he might flee. Nothing could have been further from his capability or intent. Perhaps a single, unattached man, such as Dr. Hans Meyer, could disappear from Ahlem—if he had the means and the courage, and Dr. Meyer must have had both. A family of five could not just disappear. Father was not about to leave us at the worst moment of our life. He had managed to bring Eva and me back from Holland, and as he assured us in his letters to Holland and later in person: “I am determined to keep us together.” I sensed that he had suffered as much by our separation as Eva and I. We knew that we were being deported to Theresienstadt although I do not know who told us. Aside from our own family of five, there were Fritzi and Edgar Baum, a young, deaf-dumb Jewish couple who were dental technicians. Until nowtheyhadbeenexemptedfromdeportationbecauseoftheirexceptional skill in “rebuilding” the faces of German soldiers who were coming back from the Eastern front with severely wounded or frostbitten faces. I do not know whether their skill had suddenly been devalued. They may have had to teach it to their German colleagues and were no longer indispensable. There was Ingeborg Ferche, the young woman whom we had met in prison. She had been released for deportation , possibly because, at her request, Father interceded for her. She survived the war, not least because Dr. Leo Baeck, who had considerable influence on some events during the last years of Theresienstadt, protected “mixed breeds” (descen- 96 Theresienstadt dants of a marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew) from further deportation to the “East.” Apparently for Dr. Baeck, like for so many other German Jews, the law was the law, no matter whose. (Seen from today’s perspective, this sounds like a generalization, but at the time it was a widespread attitude, a mixture of the old habit of obedience and the all-pervasive fear.) The ninth person was Frau Regina Engel, the seventy-four-year-old Hungarian woman whom we girls had met at our Ohestrasse seder. Father had continued to show his respect for her, perhaps even a kind of filial protection. As far as I know, the freight train that took us to Theresienstadt, with all of us sitting together on the floor, was not hooked up to any other transport. Lotte did not feel well on the trip. Shaken by fierce retching, she stuck her head out of the open sliding door of the freight car. This picture puzzles me. Did the Gestapo leave that door only partially secured? Perhaps that open door was a whim of the Hannover Gestapo that was deporting us? There was no place for us to escape to on June 30, 1943. Too many Germans still believed they would win the war, and they would not have given us shelter. Our group of nine people was in this one freight car. When Lotte reappeared, her face was white. But when we asked her how she felt, she only shook her head. We were too preoccupied with our own anxieties and fears to ask why Lotte, a healthy, sturdy girl who always seemed so calm, should be the one among us who was feeling so ill. Even if we could have done so, we had no wish to watch the passing scenery. The trip took more than one day, but the shock of our deportation had made me apathetic since leaving Ahlem. Our ominously hostile reception by Czech Jewish ghetto workers on our arrival in Theresienstadt rudely shook us awake. I could only wonder what awaited us here. Rudely, first our baggage, then we were searched; without ceremony, stuff these men liked or wanted was taken out of our rucksacks and “confiscated.” It was immediately obvious that from now on, Father and we would be lowly inhabitants of this place—in contrast to what I had seen as the somewhat special position that he, and we because of him, occupied in Hannover. When the ghetto workers had finally finished with us, we walked with them into the ghetto. We were put up in the attic of one of the many small houses, set in an enclosed...

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