The Potemkin Ghetto

In 1941, the SS cleared out the Czech citizens of Theresienstadt (Terezin), an 18th-century garrison town near Prague, and converted it into a "model ghetto" for Jews. A small, walled town, it was a perfect place to hold detainees. From 1942 into 1945, over 140,000 Jewish deportees from throughout Europe were sent to Theresienstadt; some 35,000 died there (of epidemic diseases like typhus, or exhaustion or malnutrition), but for another 88,000 it was just a way station on the route to one of the death camps.

Theresienstadt was a "model ghetto" in two senses. It was a new ghetto entirely created by the Nazis in a place where Jews had not lived before. And it was a show ghetto, where the Nazis sought to reassure the rest of the world that Jewish deportees were not being mistreated, merely segregated in relatively normal settings like this "settlement area." The ghetto was ostensibly run by a Jewish council of elders?though, of course, strictly monitored by the Nazis?and preserved at least the appearance of some everyday institutions, like a rudimentary hospital. On the other hand, detainees lived in segregated barracks and conducted forced labor.

But the ruse of the quotidian did its job. A three-person team from the International Red Cross who visited the ghetto in July 1944 reported, "We must say that we are astonished to find out that the Ghetto was a community leading an almost normal existence..." That September, more than 18,000 inhabitants of this "almost normal" community were rounded up and shipped off of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where most of them died.

"As part of this deception," writes the late historian Sybil H. Milton, "the SS tolerated some cultural activities, including theater, music, lectures, and concerts. Other cultural activities, such as art and teaching the children were not specifically prohibited, but carried risks if discovered." The Nazis made propaganda films of the detainees at their soccer games and lectures (Freizeitgestaltung, "leisure time activities"); recorded classical music concerts by the ghetto orchestra; showed the world the children's poems; commissioned work from the professional architects, sculptors, ceramicists and other craftsmen. Clandestinely, the artists siphoned off ink, paper, watercolors and such to make their own work.

An estimated 12,000 children were detained at Theresienstadt, of whom some 1600 were alive at liberation. They lived in barracks apart from their parents, and those over 12 were forced to work. "Although teaching was not specifically forbidden by the Nazis," Milton writes, "it was also not explicitly allowed; thus, school classes were conducted in semi-tolerated secrecy." This included art classes. Some 4000 artworks by the children survived. They also performed plays and music. In 1943 an engineer detained in the ghetto, Oswald Pöck, made for the kids a board game called Smelina, based on the American game of Monopoly (first released in 1935 and quickly popular in Europe). Smelina is colloquial Czech for the black market, and Pöck's game translated Monopoly to Theresienstadt. Instead of Atlantic Avenue, the squares on which players might land included "Entwesung" (the delousing station) and the guards' barracks. Instead of building a hotel, you'd build a kumbal, an attic residence above the barracks. For money, players used the camp scrip called "ghetto kronen."

Pöck died in Auschwitz in 1944, but his homemade version of Monopoly is one of the thousands of heartbreaking artworks and artifacts that have been preserved from Theresienstadt, much of it in the permanent collection of the Jewish Museum in Prague and the Terezin Ghetto Museum. In February of last year, Moravian College in Pennsylvania hosted an exhibition of some of these works, curated by Anne D. Dutlinger, an assistant professor there. There was also a symposium.

That exhibit and symposium are the basis for an absorbing and moving book, Art, Music and Education as Strategies for Survival: Theresienstadt 1941-45, edited by Dutlinger and handsomely published by Paul Williams' one-man East Village press, Herodias (204 pages, $75 hardcover, $45 soft). It's packed with reproductions, and with text by Milton, Dutlinger, Czech historian Vojtech Blodig and various survivors.

Much of the art in the book is by the children. Each piece comes with the child artist's name and whether he or she survived or "perished"?the latter, naturally, being terribly sad to see next to a pretty little collage or drawing. The kids were taught to draw what they saw. They did pencil portraits of themselves or one another, drew their classrooms or the barracks or the constricted view of the walled town out their windows. Touching in their own right, as all children's art is, these images come freighted with the tremendous weight of history, of what we know these kids were going through, which many of them did not survive. A child's pencil drawing of a rushing train takes on a terrible meaning; a bolt of black lightning above a crudely rendered barracks scars the sky like half a colossal SS insignia.

Some of the adult work is equally poignant. A lovely impressionist watercolor forces you to ponder the enigma of beautiful art produced in awful circumstances: apart from its esthetic appeal to us, and any extra historical/contextual meaning we choose to pile on it, what did it mean to the artist to be producing such beauty in such squalor? Sybil Milton: "The relationship between arts and atrocity, although not yet fully understood, enriches our understanding of the special place of Theresienstadt in the Nazi ghetto and camp system, and at the time, enabled artists to retain their individuality and survive under conditions of extreme duress." Milton identifies diverse purposes the art served: "documentation, decoration, catharsis, and survival." The detainees put on cabaret performances, one suspects, to divert themselves briefly from the ugly truth; at the same time they produced and furtively circulated homemade magazines and journals, to keep themselves informed and focused.

One detainee who stands out is the artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Born and raised in middle-class Vienna, she pursued a career in applied arts at the Bauhaus. She opened her own atelier in 1925, and took commissions for architectural and interior designs. But by the early 1930s she had concentrated on teaching art to children.

Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, and Austria went fascist in '34; Dicker was jailed for a time that year for her political beliefs, and fled to Prague. In '42, she and her husband, Pavel Brandeis, were deported to Theresienstadt. She was particularly active in organizing clandestine art classes for the children. In 1944 she was moved from the ghetto to Auschwitz. "She was killed in the gas chambers shortly after arrival, accompanied by a group of her young students," according to the Jewish Museum of Prague's Michaela Hajkova.

An exhibit of Dicker-Brandeis' art, and a monograph on her work, will come out later this year. The Moravian exhibition of Theresienstadt art is now touring Europe, and will return to the U.S. next year.

Anne Dutlinger will speak Thurs., March 29, 7:30, at the Leo Baeck Institute, 15 W. 16th St. (betw. 5th & 6th Aves.), 744-6400.

Afterwords

Half a century after Theresienstadt, Gerry Albarelli answered an ad in a newspaper and found himself teaching English to Hasidic boys in a yeshiva in Brooklyn. Teacha!: Stories from a Yeshiva (Glad Day, 106 pages, $10.95) is a lovely little memoir of that quite literal clash of cultures. Poetic but never mawkish, lyrical without romanticizing, it's a rare glimpse into the closed world of Jewish fundamentalism and cultural archconservatism. To the new teacher, the boys are like wild animals with whom he can barely communicate at first; to them, the teacher is a complete outsider, and not so much a mystery for that as a cipher, a non-Jew being in effect a nonentity to them.

"It was very hard if not impossible for the English teachers to meet the boys' high standards," Albarelli writes. "To start with, the English teachers were in the eyes of the boys not real men?that is, not Jewish men?most were unbearded, and some even without yarmulkes (though really any Jew who was not a member of the school's particular sect was not considered a real Jew). It was as if the boys, used to giving unconditional respect to adult male Jewish figures, saw the English teachers as only bigger, misshapen boys."

It takes both sides a long time to develop a (sometimes grudging) mutual respect, but there's no grand cinematic payoff in the end: he and the kids come to like each other, yet they remain inhabitants of two very different, though contiguous, worlds. He doesn't convert, they never quite get over their sense of him as an outsider, but they manage to learn some things from each other, which is maybe all that should be expected. A very interesting read.

Eric Kraft's The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy is one of the biggest, funniest, sweetest and looniest undertakings in contemporary American fiction. What began years ago as a serial of nine hilarious novellas (later collected under one roof as Little Follies) about young Leroy and the Long Island coastal town of Babbington has kept evolving, adding layers of narrative and meta-narrative through numerous novels, reaching tentacles out from Babbington to Boston and Miami, metastasizing until it's taken over the lives of a whole galaxy of characters, including the author himself, and blurred the lines between fiction and nonfiction. "Like the ingredients in a good clam chowder," Kraft writes, "each piece of this work is intended to contribute its individual flavor and texture to a single savory dish." (Kraft, like most of his Babbingtonians, has a thing about clam chowder, and clams in general. One of the original Leroy novellas went by the unforgettable title Do Clams Bite?)

Showing what the Internet is good for, there's now an excellent website charting the whole Peter Leroy galaxy, http://members.aol.com/leroypeter. And to entice readers back on a regular basis, Kraft's begun serializing his latest Leroy novel, Inflating a Dog?as usual, there's a funny and unexpected explanation for the title?on the site, putting up a chapter a week.