The editor-in-chief of the magazine Vedem, put together voluntarily by the youth of Terezín, was born in Prague on February 1, 1928. His parents were passionate advocates of the universal language Esperanto, and people with a deep interest in culture. In October 1942, the Gestapo ordered Petr and several hundred others to be deported to Terezín, while his parents and sister remained temporarily in Prague. Petr was one of the few unaccompanied children in Terezín, although his parents regularly sent him packages containing food and writing paper. In one letter that has been preserved, Petr asked his family for chewing gum, notebooks, a spoon, bread, illustrations for copying … and a sociology book. He shared his packages with his roommates. His generosity, intelligence, and pleasant manner made him one of the boys most loved by both his companions and his teachers. In 1944 he was deported to Auschwitz; he didn’t return home when the war ended. But his name didn’t appear on any list of the dead, either, and for ten years his family held out the faint hope that they would see him again. At the end of that time, they were contacted by Jehuda Bacon, who had been deported on the same transport. He explained to them that when they were sent to Auschwitz, a selection was carried out on the station platform itself: Those on the right went to the camp, and those on the left went directly to the gas chambers. Jehuda saw Petr being assigned to the left group.
DAVID SCHMULEWSKI
The Polish leader of the Resistance in Auschwitz was already a veteran left-winger before he was detained—he had fought in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, and later against the Nazis. After the war ended, he held several important positions in the Polish Communist Party. A murky business in which he was caught up—something to do with the trafficking of works of art—forced him to step down from the Party, and he ended up in exile in Paris, where he lived until his death. It is not known to what extent his involvement in the trafficking of artwork was a ploy by leaders of the Communist Party to discredit him, since his status as a war hero made him untouchable. His grand-nephew, the polemical and brilliant English intellectual Christopher Hitchens, who died in 2011, talks about some of these matters in his book Hitch-22.
SIEGFRIED LEDERER
He was the fellow escapee with SS First Officer Viktor Pestek, whose desertion cost him his life. Lederer escaped from the Gestapo by the skin of his teeth and became an active member of the Resistance. In Zrabaslav he passed himself off as an SS general to help local Resistance groups. He ended up in Slovakia, where he spent the rest of the war helping local partisans.
JOSEF MENGELE
In January 1945, a few days before the Allied forces liberated Auschwitz, Josef Mengele blended into a retreating infantry battalion. In this way, he ended up being one of hundreds of soldiers taken prisoner and managed to pass unnoticed by the Allies. He was assisted not only by the chaos in the first few weeks after the war ended, but by the fact that the Allies were identifying members of the SS by a tattoo they all had on their arms that identified their blood type—something regular soldiers did not have. Mengele, always prudent, had never been tattooed. He managed to escape from Germany with the financial assistance of his influential industrialist family and took refuge in Argentina. He lived an agreeable, upper-class life there as a partner in a pharmaceuticals company. Toward the end of the 1950s, Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal picked up Mengele’s tracks thanks to divorce papers he signed—an action he agreed to by letter with his wife. But someone managed to warn Mengele that he’d been discovered, and he left for Uruguay. He lived there under a new false identity but in considerably less comfortable circumstances, in a modest shack and with the worry of knowing he was being pursued. He was, however, never caught. He died in 1979 at the age of sixty-eight while bathing in the sea—probably of a heart attack. In the biography of Mengele written by Gerald Posner and John Ware, the authors tell how, after years of intermittent contact by mail, Mengele’s son Rolf went to visit him before his death. Rolf was finally able to ask the question that had been eating away at him since he was a child, that is, whether Mengele was really responsible for the atrocious crimes attributed to him. It was difficult for a son to accept that his father—so solicitous and considerate in his letters—could be the vicious monster talked about in the media. When Rolf finally asked him face-to-face if he really had ordered thousands of people to be executed, Josef Mengele assured him that it was just the opposite. Showing absolutely no emotion or doubt, Mengele told his son that thanks to his selections—in which he separated those Jews who were still in a fit state to work from those who were going to be killed—he had saved thousands from death by assigning them to the “suitable” line.
SEPPL LICHTENSTERN
Seppl Lichtenstern was selected for transportation from the family camp to the Schwarzheide camp in Germany in July 1944. There, the Nazis put him to work in a factory that converted brown coal into diesel fuel. At the end of the war, the Nazis organized a macabre march, with no food supplies, of thousands of prisoners from camps that were about to fall into the hands of the Allies. It was a march-flight to nowhere in particular. It was called “the death march” because weapons were fired without warning and those who were dying were summarily executed by the side of the road. Thousands of these prisoners, including Lichtenstern, died during this final act of Nazi madness. His remains lie in the Saupsdorf cemetery in Germany.
MARGIT BARNAI
Margit got married and lived the rest of her life in Prague. Although Dita emigrated to Israel, they never lost touch. They exchanged letters and photographs of their children. Margit had three daughters. The youngest was born when Margit was already forty years old. She was baptized with the name Dita. Dita Kraus continues to keep in touch with Margit’s daughters. She’s like an aunt to them, and they catch up whenever Dita visits Prague.
PRIMARY SOURCES
Adler, Shimon. “Block 31: The Children’s Block in the Family Camp at Birkenau.” Yad Vashem Studies XXIV (1994): 281–315.
Demetz, Peter. Prague in Danger. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
Gutman, Yisrael, and Michael Berenbaum, eds. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
Kraus, Ota B. The Painted Wall. Tel Aviv: Yaron Golan Publishing, 1994.
K?í?ková, Marie Rút, Kurt Ji?í Kotou?, and Zdeněk Ornest. We Are Children Just the Same: Vedem, the Secret Magazine by the Boys of Terezin. Prague: Aventinum Nakladatelství, 1995.