Judy Schreiber - February 1, 2013
Theresienstadt: The Family Camp
Mm-hm. Now, Terezin was a very unusual camp in that, you know, they allowed children to be alive. Um, what do you, what have you learned about Terezin yourself about why they did this?
Well, I just, this I primarily just know from reading...
Mm-hm.
That uh, you know, it was supposed to be some kind of a uh, it was a quote unquote ultimately was used to show to the uh, to the International Red Cross...
Red Cross.
That it was a, you know, pleasant place to live, we don't kill the Jews here.
Right.
My dad saved some money that they printed...
Uh-huh.
To pretend that we were allowed to go to stores. That was one thing, the other thing was that I think some prominent people were in that camp.
Uh-huh.
That were like uh, probably upper echelon Jews in Prague.
Uh-huh.
Who they couldn't dispose of immediately. It was like a way station, I think.
Mm-hm.
Partly they assembled people in one place and then sent them off by train to die at another place.
Mm-hm.
And the assembling point, I think was Terezin. There wasn't, there were no gas chambers there, that I, you know, I mean, I read that. Although my dad says right towards the end of the war, he said that they began to build what he thought were going to be gas chambers.
But what you saw?
What I saw, I, I mean...
The, the dead bodies that you saw?
Yeah, that, well, you know what I think that I could not put that into any kind of perspective exactly, but as time went on there were certain um, events that, that took place that on a level that I couldn't uh, clearly conceptualize but knew enough to know. For instance, right towards the end of the war they brought a transport into Terezin from some other terrible camp where these people had been.
Mm-hm.
And they brought them in these cattle cars. And many of them were unable to walk and they were on stretchers, what to me were, looked like stretchers, I thought. They were lying down and I remember going with my dad to that same train station where they were being unloaded...
Mm-hm.
Into Terezin. And my dad had--I didn't know that, but then I saw what was happening. He, he had in his pocket, like, a number of cubes of sugar.
Oh.
And I remember holding his hand and he was walking around where the, the people were taken off the train, the ones that were really sick.
Yes.
And they were lying on the ground, I thought on stretchers but who knows, maybe it was just the ground or whatever. And my dad gave one of them a piece of ??? sugar is what they called, my dad called it a ??? sugar, like a little sugar square. And when the person that was lying there, and this is the memory that I have, that I saw this one person got sugar.
Hm.
They put their hand together like in a prayer motion and were begging my dad for sugar. And my dad had a few more pieces like that and he gave them to these people. And I just uh, 'til he didn't have any,
Mm-hm.
He didn't have that much, because I remember there was just a few of them. But I remember thinking that these are like really, really sick looking people.
Mm-hm.
And something's wrong with them.
I see.
And so, I have, I have those kinds of memories. I have memories of sitting on that hill where I used to sit and at various times airplanes...
Oh.
Would fly over and they would drop silver threads of some kind of paper, silver paper. I don't know what that was, I never read about it, I never had my parents explain to it...
Mm-hm.
But at some point, and I remember scurrying around, along, around that hill to pick up these silver little things...
Mm-hm.
That came off the planes flying down um, it was like a wonderful toy to me.
Yes.
It was something I could collect that, that, that was gorgeous... That was on the one hand but then on the other hand if I looked across the street there might be another wagon pulling up with dead bodies.
© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn