Preamble to the educational project

The following preamble was written by members of the educational team that Alexander Wolf, Wiesbaden, and that from 2019 met him several times for exchange and brainstorming in Wiesbaden. The team, young educators, used the words shown here by Margit Mühlstein, social worker in the girls' home in the Theresienstadt ghetto, as a leitmotif. They are in the poetry album of Flaška.

Preamble

The girls in room 28- This is the story of a group of Jewish girls who lived together in room 28 of the girls' home L 410 in the Theresienstadt ghetto between 1942 and 1944. Cared for by adults who were themselves inmates of the ghetto, they opposed the systematic dehumanization of the National Socialists.

In room 28, in an inhumane environment, they created an individual alternative world in which they upheld and lived out values such as humanity, friendship, solidarity and tolerance towards one another. With the founding of their small organization 'Ma'agal', they set themselves high goals and made them their motto in life. Room 28 thus became a "germ cell of humanity", so to speak.

The story sheds light on the disenfranchisement of Jews in Europe with a focus on Austria and Czechoslovakia, describes life and everyday life in the Theresienstadt ghetto, an everyday life that already harbors the coming tragedy. The story and the multimedia Room 28 educational project convey the fate of the Jewish children of the Theresienstadt ghetto and tell the story of the deportation and extermination of European Jews.

The authentic documents of the girls - Helga Pollak's diary, Anna Flach's poetry album, Handa Pollak's notebook, photos, poems, sketches, pictures, the hymn of room 28 and many other testimonies from Theresienstadt and Auschwitz - give an insight into the living environment and the fate of the "girls from room 28", most of whom were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Of about 60 girls temporarily living in room 28, fifteen survived the Holocaust.

Hannelore Brenner (b. 1951) has designed all of this artistically and literary over the years and thus developed an educationally valuable project - book, exhibition, play, readings, encounters with contemporary witnesses, film recordings, workshops and an extensive media archive.

For us, the younger generation, it is now a matter of using the pedagogical potential, of preparing the existing material in separate units (modules) for special and diverse teaching goals and thus giving pupils and students a realistic, emotional and factual approach to a chapter of the Holocaust that breathes the experiences and spirit of the protagonists, the "Girls of Room 28".

The project is rooted in the wishes of the survivors and has been realized by the author Hannelore Brenner since 1996 in close cooperation with the survivors.

Sara Huppertz, Esther Nauth, Alexander Placke, Matthias Prill and Alexander Wolf

February 15, 2020, Wiesbaden