insert_drive_file
Text from page 1
Statement

Written with Mrs. Heda Grabová, born 6. VIII. 1899, residing in Prague I., Plátnéřská 7., Czech nationality, profession opera singer, former prisoner in the Theresienstadt – ghetto concentration camp.

When I arrived in Theresienstadt on 17. 12. 1941 as an N-transport, we had no idea that it would be possible to sing or put on a theater performance during our imprisonment. We were simply ready for a life of working in factories etc., as we had been told. However, it’s well known that things looked and ended up differently. It can be said that in the beginning all we had was our fear of more transports to Poland. We peeled potatoes a little and were terrified of the executions that were taking place at the time. But in two months, when some work was organized under Edelstein’s leadership and when newer and newer transports continued to arrive, a need arose to give people some spiritual nourishment along with their bad food and, one day, in the Hamburg barracks, where 3,000 women were housed, Fredy Hirsch and Rabbi Weiner appeared and charged me, since I was known to them as an old singer and actress, with the task of creating something that was given the name Freizeitgestaltung in the Dienstelle. In short, I was to put together fun and educational programs, and organize language courses and lectures. If possible, also a library out of the books that individuals had brought with them to Theresienstadt. Thus my work began. I procured a room, a hall that had not yet been inhabited, I had benches brought in and carried some in myself, I looked for a musical instrument, at least a harmonica, which could only be played in secret, however, because it was strictly forbidden to have musical instruments in the ghetto. We held a so-called audition of everyone who had engaged in recitation, singing and dancing, and I put together the first vibrant program. On March 21st, 1942, the so-called staff and Judenältester Edelstein came into the women’s barracks, which was a small miracle since men weren’t allowed in the women’s barracks and vice versa. The so-called first cultural evening took place, but it started at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. I made sure that the program was stylish as well as educational. I sang, a group of 6 young girls danced the Czech polka, and the Adler sisters, the daughters of Friedrich Adler, recited and sang several short operetta soubrettes from days of yore. I welcomed the audience myself and performed, and the whole event was so successful that not only did we repeat the same program several times to allow as many women as possible to be able to attend it, but we received permission for the whole group to visit other barracks (men’s), where we performed this show. This is how we began to share our art with the poor souls so that they could forget about the dire poverty in which they were living if only for a moment. We also went to hospitals and sang and recited between the beds, generally with no musical accompaniment, which was very difficult for the male singer or female singer, who was used to standing on a stage and singing accompanied by an orchestra. But we were happy to do it, because we brought the poor souls a little something from a better world. This was how it all began. In time, more and more former singers, musicians, and composers arrived in Theresienstadt, and the administration came to see the theater in a different light. It gave us a space and got the kommandantur to approve musical instruments, and so it happened that in the concentration camp, under the leadership of the deceased bandleader Rafael Schächter, we rehearsed and performed an entire opera: The Bartered Bride by Bedřich Smetana. At night, in the Sudeten barracks where he lived, Schächter began to study Jewish choir pieces with the help of a single tuning fork that I had lent him. He got the idea

insert_drive_file
Text from page 2
to study the choruses from The Bartered Bride and I put together a group of girls from our barracks. He practiced with the men in the Sudeten barracks and gradually, when the right soloists were found, we got the idea to do the whole opera as a concert. Somewhere in the Sokol gymnasium was an old, battered piano without legs and he managed to find a half-broken harmonium, and, somewhere in the cellar, a tiny room where he could regularly practice with his group. During the coldest part of the winter, bundled up to our ears, we rehearsed The Bartered Bride. We were finally ready and now needed to move the piano at night in secret into the ghetto, because the Sokol gymnasium could no longer be used. They let us use a gym in a boys home and we finally performed The Bartered Bride in Theresienstadt on November 28th, 1942. It was an unforgettable experience. When the first measures of Proč bychom se netěšili sounded there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. We performed The Bartered Bride around 35 times. Then we started rehearsing something new, this time The Marriage of Figaro, and in the rest of the time we spent in Theresienstadt we gradually performed the operas The Bartered Bride, The Kiss, The Marriage of Figaro, The Magic Flute, Rigoletto, Tosca, Carmen, Bastien and Bastienne, La Serva Padrona, Verdi’s Requiem, Tvorstvo, Elias, and many choir concerts, many German and Czech plays, countless cabarets, even a circus performance in the courtyard of the Hamburg barracks and the Bauhof, a hundred individual piano, instrumental, and vocal concerts, in time even orchestral concerts conducted by the bandleader Ančerl, several operettas, among them Die Fledermaus. In the year 1943-1944, Theresienstadt’s cultural and theatrical life was so full that a mid-sized city in peacetime hadn’t put on as many events as we had in our ghetto. The theater halls were small and limited; the so-called Raumwirtschaft needed everything when the transports arrived. And so we had to establish small stages in the attics of the barracks and larger residential houses, where the acoustics were terrible, the heat in summer and the cold in winter was unbearable, that was for sure. But the audience’s enthusiasm and the performers’ joy made us forget these things. The performances were sold out even under these conditions. It seems strange that the SS allowed Jews in the ghetto to cultivate music, art, lectures etc. in such a way, but the gentlemen knew very well what they were doing. They wanted these things to help make Therezsienstadt a model to present to foreign countries, the so-called Musterghetto. They awaited the arrival of some sort of commission, and so they even let us use the Sokol gymnasium and ordered the operas to be performed perfectly, in costume and with wigs, basically a real theater performance. And so real theater, beautifully theatrically staged, was played at the beginning of May 1944, at the height of the so-called Verschönerung of Theresienstadt. Architects Zelenka, Prof. Lederer and other famous artists worked non-stop to prepare the various stages. All of the lighting equipment and light bulbs necessary for the theater had to be brought into Theresienstadt. A pavilion was erected in the square, where the town’s band, wonderful musicians all of them and each individually a virtuoso, performed every day. The Trio played in the cafe and cabarets (Hans Hofer) were held, and, in the summer, performances took place outside in the courtyards. In the summer of 1944, Theresienstadt seemed like an El Dorado in Europe, a place where there are no air strikes, no fronts, in short, no dangers threatened it. The famous commission arrived and apparently went around. An utter farce was performed, children had to run behind the SS-komandant, tug at his coat and cry: Uncle, come play with us, to which he replied: Today I cannot, but tomorrow I shall. The famous film director Kurt Geron had to make a film.  Actors waited in the theaters, ready to start playing at the moment when the commission set foot inside, as if the opera or play was already under way. After 5 minutes, the commission moved on and the play stopped. Everyone went home. The composers Haas, Krása, Ullmann, and Gideon Klein were also urged to compose operas or songs that then had to be played. The SS itself ordered this.

insert_drive_file
Text from page 3

Two children’s operas were also performed: Brundibár, composed by Hans Krása, and Broučci, a collection of Czech folk songs, directed by Váva Schönová, the bandleader Brok, and the director Thein. Children up to age 14 played and sang.

It seemed unimaginable that things could continue thus. And the ax did indeed come down. As soon as the commission left, the ghetto in Theresienstadt began to be liquidated. In just 4 weeks, 18,600 Jews were transported to the so-called labor camp. In reality, they were taken to Auschwitz, where a large part went directly to the gas chambers and only a small number, when it passed through the selection process, was sent on to concentration camps. Almost all of the menartists, actors, composers, singers, bandleaders, instrumentalistslost their lives. Only seven women out of the entire group remained in Theresienstadt. They were forgotten about and so they didn’t go to the same place as the other 18,600. When the last transport left Theresienstadt for Auschwitz on October 28th 1944, Judenältester Murmelstein had to hand over to Lagerhalter Rahm the remaining people who were not parading before him, and it was discovered that 7 women – a singer, a piano player, i.e. a piano player and actress – were forgotten. When Murmelstein asked whether they should be put on the last transport, Rahm, smiling condescendingly, said in his Viennese dialect: Aber was, lassenses da. Sollens dann wieder spielen und singen. This saved our lives. We immediately had to join the so-called Glimmerspalterei, where we split mica from 5:30 in the morning until 2:00 in the afternoon, but about 3 days after the last transport departed, I received an order to put together a new concert program. And so we had to create an evening program to be held in the unheated space of the Sokol gymnasium and quickly rehearse the pieces, and once again sing for those who remained in Theresienstadt. Four months went by, until March 7th, 1945, when Mr. Rahm took us off mica duty and ordered us to quickly rehearse the children’s opera Broučci and the opera The Tales of Hoffmann, because another commission was soon to arrive. Our days and nights were spent writing out the music, making sure the orchestra had the material it needed, rehearsing with the musicians who had arrived because they were married to an Aryan. And so we played again in the Sokol gymnasium in costume on a beautifully decorated stage. The commission arrived and everything went well, and life in Theresienstadt seemed to be as it had been before the thousands had departed. Then, around April 20th, the 1st transport of the so-called pajama wearers from Buchenwald arrived in Theresienstadt and our eyes were opened. We discovered the true reality and that day all of the singing, playing, and distracting ourselves stopped. We were in no mood to sing. We were liberated soon afterwards and our musical artistic career in Theresienstadt came to an end. I sang almost every day, played in all of the operas, and I can probably say that singing and my art was the one thing that saved my life and spared me from the suffering that thousands of my brothers and sister must have experienced.

I can say that Theresienstadt was the longest and worst-paid engagement in my entire musical and theatrical career.

Signature:

Heda Grabová

Statement was accepted by:

Berta Gerzonová

Signatures of witnesses: Accepted on behalf of the Documentation campaign:

Dita Saxlová Scheck

Helena Schicková

Accepted on behalf of the archive: 29. IX. 1945

Alex. Schmiedt