The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope, and Survival in Theresienstadt

Name: The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope, and Survival in Theresienstadt
Price: 13.67 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Hannelore Brenner
ISBN: 9780805242447

From 1942 to 1944, twelve thousand children passed through the Theresienstadt internment camp on their way to Auschwitz. The Jews deported to Theresienstadt were aware of the fate that awaited them, and they decided that it was the young people who had the best chance to survive. They were housed separately, in dormitory-like barracks, where they had a greater chance of staying healthy and better access to food, and where counselors created a disciplined environment despite the surrounding horrors. Under their instruction, the children produced art, poetry, and music, and they performed in theatrical productions, most notably Brundibar, the legendary “children’s opera” that celebrates the triumph of good over evil.

In the mid-1990s, German journalist Hannelore Brenner met ten of these child survivors — women in their late-seventies today, who reunite every year at a resort in the Czech Republic. Weaving her interviews with the women together with excerpts from diaries that were kept secretly during the war and samples of the art, music, and poetry created at Theresienstadt, Brenner gives us an unprecedented picture of daily life there, and of the extraordinary strength, sacrifice, and indomitable will that combined — in the girls and in their caretakers — to make survival possible.