Sidney Taussig

Sidney Taussig / Zdenek Taussig (M / Czechia, 1929), Holocaust survivor.

• One of the collaborators of Vedem.

• KEYWORDS : <Czechia> <Theresienstadt> <Liberation of Theresienstadt>

Biography

At Theresienstadt he was a collaborator of the magazine Vedem.

He was the one who hid and preserved the copies of the magazine until liberation.

The Philadelphia Inquirer (22 June 2019)

Sidney Zdenek Taussig was 12 years old when he and his family were sent to Terezin, the Nazi-run World War II concentration camp about 30 miles north of Prague.

By day, he helped collect dozens of bodies of those who died each day, load them onto a horse cart, and deliver them to the crematorium. By night, he and other boys in his dorm defied the Germans and secretly published a weekly magazine, Vedem, that documented their lives at Terezin through their own essays, poetry, and artwork.

More than 75 years later, the young members of the Keystone State Boychoir used their voices, hearts, and compassion to honor Taussig, now 89, and the many residents of Terezin who did not survive. Their concert was held June 1 at the National Museum of American Jewish History and it rekindled Taussig’s memories of his bunk mates — both joyful and sad. It meant the world to him, he said, that the tale of the Vedem boys and what became of them has not been forgotten.

“To this day there are people who still don’t think the Holocaust happened," he said.

‘He perished in the gas chamber’

Terezin, once a resort for Czech nobility, was a “model” ghetto-camp, called "Theresienstadt” by the Nazis. It held prominent Jews, primarily from Czechoslovakia, Germany, and Austria, including a number of scholars, scientists, artists, and musicians. About 140,000 people were sent to the fortress town, including 15,000 children, most of whom were later deported to death camps.

Taussig was housed in Home One, a dorm room for about 32 boys ages 13 to 15 who nicknamed their cramped quarters the “Republic of Shkid,” after a Soviet novel about an orphanage. It would be a stopping point for about 133 boys, only a handful of whom survived.

Home One’s leader, schoolteacher Valtr Eisinger, inspired the group to write, as did Petr Ginz, the young editor-in-chief of Vedem, who found an abandoned typewriter to produce the prose; when the ink ran out, the young authors wrote it out by hand. Ginz hid the magazine from the German SS officers, Hitler’s elite paramilitary corps, either in his bunk or in the attic of the dorm. Just months before the war ended, Ginz, 16, was deported to Auschwitz. With his departure, the group stopped writing and the magazine ceased publication.

“He was in the last transport,” said Taussig. “He perished in the gas chamber."

Taussig was also slated for that last transport but was saved when his father, a blacksmith, appealed to the German SS, saying he needed his son to help shoe the horses. As the only boy left in the dorm, Taussig grabbed the hidden copies of Vedem and, with his father’s help, buried them behind the camp’s blacksmith shop. They were placed next to the remains of his grandmother, who had died of natural causes at age 81 and whose ashes, stored in a feed bag, Taussig had been able to save while tasked with disposing of cremated remains.

Even as a teen Taussig knew how important it was to save the magazine so there would be some record of what really happened at the concentration camp and to the boys, who would have gone on to be “great, great people.”

“You grow up pretty fast under hardship,” he said.

In May 1945, Russian troops liberated the camp. As Taussig and his family — his parents and sister had survived Terezin with him — prepared for their return to Prague, the teen unearthed both his grandmother’s remains and the metal box that contained the 800 worn pages of Vedem and carried them out of the camp.

Before Taussig immigrated to the United States, he gave the magazines to the mother of one of the Vedem boys who did not survive. Eventually, the pages made their way into print and into a digital exhibit in Terezin.

Planning a choir trip to Czechoslovakia

In 2017, Steven Fisher, the founder of the Keystone State Boychoir, was in Terezin scouting locations for the group to visit on its upcoming European tour. As he wandered through the camp’s shop, one book caught his eye. It was called We Are Children Just the Same; Vedem, the Secret Magazine by the Boys of Terezín.

Back at his hotel, Fisher spent the night reading the prose and poems from Vedem, finishing the book as the sun rose.

“I just became captivated by it,” Fisher said. When he returned to Philadelphia and began planning the Boychoir’s European tour, he suggested the boys meet on Friday nights to read entries from Vedem (a Czech word meaning “in the lead") in preparation for the Terezin leg of their journey.

The boys soon learned that Taussig, now 89, was living in West Palm Beach, Fla., and a few of them visited him with Fisher. Afterward, they decided to perform a concert in Philadelphia about Vedem in his honor and invited him to attend.

The choir worked with Whit MacLaughlin, an Obie- and Barrymore-award winner and artistic director of New Paradise Laboratories, who helped arrange the material for a theatrical performance and directed the boys.

“What came out of it was a piece they could perform anywhere,” said MacLaughlin.

The writings made a deep impression on the choir members, including Antonio Saraiva, Charlie Hewson, and Walter Savage, who felt a huge responsibility to portray the Vedem boys accurately in their production.

“Imagine having your whole childhood stripped away,” said Savage, 12, a student at Germantown Friends School. “It’s a sad thing."

With Taussig’s blessing, Fisher, who is also a playwright, plans to turn Taussig’s life story into a full-length play called The Last Boy of Vedem in the Second Republic of Shkid.

A night of remembrance On the evening of the performance, as Taussig and his wife of 66 years, Marion, walked to their front-row seats with their grandson Ben, the audience spontaneously rose and applauded.

The audience watched as the choir crossed the imaginary threshold of the Home One dorm, marked with heavy black tape on the stage floor, and began to sing the “Anthem of the Republic of Shkid,” written by the young poet HanuŠ Hachenburg.

Taussig wiped a tear from his blue eyes as he remembered Hachenburg, his bunk mate, who perished in Auschwitz.