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XI • WHEN THE PRINTED WORD CELEBRATES THE HUMAN SPIRIT Charlotte Guthmann Opfermann To Henny, Sigi, and all the other caregivers-teachers at barrack building L in Ghetto Theresienstadt, who gave comfort and meaning to the lives of others in the midst of misery, despair, and death. They live on in the endless memories of those few whom they saved, however briefly, with self-sacrifice, kindness, and love. ACOUPLE of years ago I took part in a seminar at the site of the Theresienstadt Garrison in Czechoslovakia, which was (from  until our liberation in May ) the site of a fierce Nazi concentration camp. One of the breakout sessions during this meeting in , conducted in the former SS Guard clubhouse , was devoted to the many prominent artists, writers, composers, performing artists, and scientists who were imprisoned there at one time or another. Many died in the camp; most were redeported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek , or Sobibor, to their deaths. I was in my teens when I went to Theresienstadt, and I am one of about a hundred children who survived, out of some , who had been sent to the camp. A fellow scholar, Frau Kypke from Bonn, was fascinated to learn during the  conference that there were so many famous names among the , or so inmates who were imprisoned there when I was in the camp—inventors, scientists , authors, film stars, and film directors. Word had been spread in Germany at the time, in the early s, that this camp was a privileged “Jewish settlement,” intended for World War I veterans, prominent German Jews, and people over the age of sixty-five. Unfortunately, this myth has continued to this day. In reality, it was but a transit point. Many of the arriving trains were never unloaded but sent directly on to the extermination camps and killing fields farther east. Much to my surprise, Frau Kypke, who was eighty years old or more, spoke freely of the fact that her late husband had been a guard at the Auschwitz concentration camp. But she herself had seen the light and now studied the events of the Holocaust. She said she worked for an organization called Für den Frieden (For Peace). For a while, during my own imprisonment in –, I had been privileged to know and to enjoy the friendship of some of those prominent prisoners; wonderful and exciting artists who were working alongside the rest of us, doing heavy labor. At the  conference, I was one of the sources of firsthand information . So many artists, so much talent, each with a grand total of . meters (about ⬘ ⫻ ⬙) of living space in which to stretch their legs after work for a sleepless, nightmare-burdened night. During the question-and-answer session, Frau Kypke demanded to know where one could now find the work of these many talented individuals. She was eager to read what they had written about life in the camp. I could not believe my ears. I asked her to repeat the question. Then, trying not to be impolite or to appear condescending, I said: “Frau Kypke, we were brought here to die and to be killed. We had neither paper nor ink nor contact with the outside world. No publisher or printer would have touched any of the output of a Jewish writer even years before we were arrested, ‘resettled,’ as the euphemistic expression went. They had been famous before the Third Reich, not during its reign. In the camp they worked like everybody else at heavy manual labor. Some of the very fortunate ones worked—part-time—for the internal Freizeitgestaltung [leisure-time creative organizers]. Their audience was very limited, consisted largely of prominent prisoners such as they themselves were. The rest of us had no time, energy, or leisure to indulge. Good God, we did not have toilet paper, much less paper to write on or to communicate our intellectual output to the free world.” After this outburst, I felt a little guilty. Maybe my SS-guard-widow/colleagueHolocaust -researcher was confused. I told her and some of the other conferencegoers that, indeed, many of us had packed a favorite book at the time of our deportation. We were allowed up to  pounds of luggage, consisting of warm clothing, sturdy shoes, some nonperishable food, and many of us thought it necessary to pack a book—a prayer book, a Bible, a copy of Goethe’s Faust, Shakespeare ’s Hamlet. Most of the books then landed on the piles...

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