They were twelve to fourteen years old - the girls who lived together in a very small space in the Girls’ Home L 410 in Theresienstadt from 1942 to 1944. They were ghetto prisoners, some of the 75,666 people from the so-called 'Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia' who, after German troops occupied their homeland, were declared 'Jews', persecuted, robbed, disenfranchised and finally deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. There, in the Girls' Home L 410, Room 28, their paths met.
Story
Story
The Girls of Room 28
The book and the exhibition and the play The Girls of Room 28 tell the story of Jewish girls who once lived together in Room 28, Girls' Home L410 in the Theresienstadt ghetto. The book was first published in 2004 by Doemer Verlag, Munich. The exhibition was brought to light on 23 September 2004 in Schwerin. Further information see: Book and Exhibiton.
Cared for by adults, prisoners like the children, they lived together on the closest of quarters, slept on two- or three-storey wooden bunks, took their meager food rations together, listened to the carer in the evenings when she read from a book or would talk quietly with each other when it turned dark in the room, about their experiences, their secret thoughts, their worries and fears. Again and again some girls were abruptly torn from their ranks; they had to line up for the dreaded transport to the east. New girls came, new friendships were formed. Then this community was also shaken by transport.
Image: Drawing by Maria Mühlstein. Room 28.
And yet – there were moments when the children experienced their 'home' as an island of friendship and hope. Then they learned, played, sang or painted and drew in class with the unforgettable artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis.
When the children's opera Brundibár was being rehearsed from July 1943, some of the girls from Room 28 were part of it - Ela Stein as a cat, Maria Mühlstein as a sparrow, Handa and Flaška sang in the school children's choir. And all the giurls knew the songs and they were often heard in Room 28.
Photo: Panel of the exhibition: Brundibár. A Light in the Darkness
In the cramped room 28, under the pressure of events, the girls grew into a community that created its own motto, an anthem and a flag and founded an organization, the "Ma'agal" - Hebrew for circle and, figuratively sense, perfection'. Because that was their goal. - However, the destination of the transports that took many of the girls with them was Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Most of them were murdered there, and with them more than 14,000 children of the Theresienstadt ghetto. Of about sixty girls who lived temporarily in Room 28, fifteen survived.
Image: The flag of the girls of Room 28 with their symbol, Ma'agal.
Exhibition at the United Nations in Genova, 2014
"This is a unique project focussing on the solidarity, compassion and resilience which developed as a reaction to the abnormal situation of living in the Ghetto with the constant threat of transportation to the East."
On the occasion of the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust the EU Delegation to the UN in Geneva, together with the Permanent Missions of Israel and the Czech Republic, organised an exhibition at the UN Palais des Nations in Geneva entitled The Girls of Room 28 - in remembrance of the children of the Theresienstadt Ghetto.
A click on the photo leads to the opening of the exhibtion in Geneva with the Hymn of Room 28.