Category:Girls of Room 28 (subject)

When in July 1943 rehearsals for the opera Brundibar began, girls of Room 28 were among them. Ela Stein (now Weissberger) played the cat, Maria Mühlstein often the sparrow and several times she played Pepicek's sister Aninka, on the side of her brother Eli. Handa Pollak (now Drori) played sometimes the dog and Anna Flachová (later Hanusová) sang in the choir of the school kids, and once she even played Aninka. All of the girls knew the opera by heart, and songs from Brundibár were often heard in Room 28.

Girls of Room 28

• Anna Hanusova-Flachova (F / Czechia, 1930-2014)

Anna Hanusova-Flachova, born in 1930 in Moravia in Czechoslovakia, discusses her childhood; antisemitism that she encountered in school; the German occupation of Czechoslovakia; her parents' decision to send her oldest sister to Palestine; German restrictions on Jews; continuing religious practices during the occupation; being part of the first deportation to the Theresienstadt ghetto in November 1941; being separated from her father and living with her mother and sister in the barracks; moving to a children's home after a year; her schooling in the ghetto and extra-curricular activities; the importance of music to her in the ghetto; the unsanitary conditions and hunger in the ghetto; her sister's deportation to the Auschwitz concentration camp; the deportations of many of her friends from the children's home; the Red Cross visit to Theresienstadt; liberation and the return of her sister and brother from concentration camps; a typhus epidemic that broke out in Theresienstadt right before liberation and her time recuperating in a sanatorium; returning with her family to Brno, Czechoslovakia; and the difficulties her family encountered rebuilding their lives after the war.

• Maria Mühlstein

• Judith Rosenzweig (1930-2019)

• Hanka Weingarten Chana Wertheimer (1929-2018)

12.12.1929 - 1.6.2018 - Hanka spent her childhood in her birth-town Znaim/Znojmo in the Czech Republic. When the Nazis occupied the "Sudetenland" in October 1938, her family escaped to Prague, her town of refuge. They were interned in the Ghetto and Concentration-Camp Theresienstadt till May 1944 and then, from May to July 1944 in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Together with her mother she was then sent to work in the bombed City of Hamburg clearing rubble. She ended up in April 1945 in Bergen-Belsen, was close to death, when the Americans liberated the camp. A few days after liberation her beloved mother Lily Wertheimer died.

• Ela Weissberger / Ela Stein (1930-2018)