Otto Aurich & Lisl Frank
Internet References
Cabaret in the Face of Death
By Volker Kühn
Volker Kühn entered radio and TV by way of journalism.
He spent four years in the USA; in Frankfurt while editor at the Hessischer
Rundfunk he wrote and produced a satirical program for over 10 years. Since
1970, Volker Kühn has been a freelance author and director, responsible for
many radio plays and features, stage plays, cabaret programs, musicals, TV
shows, and a "dada-apocalyptical" work that ran for hundreds of
performances. He wrote five volumes and a TV documentary (ZDF) on "100
Years of German Cabaret." Some of his other documentaries explore
entertainment under the Third Reich and cabaret in concentration camps. He has
published record collections as well as countless books on cabaret and satire,
among them several books on composer Friedrich Holländer. His play
"Marlene," about Marlene Dietrich, has had more than 500 performances.
Volker Kühn is a member of PEN and the recipient of several prizes for his
work. He lives in Berlin. Since 2004 Member of All About Jewish Theatre
Editorial Board.
e-mail : [email protected]
Web : www.vauka-berlin.de
"Listen to me! The Germans do not want to destroy only our bodies, no! They
want our soul! Do you understand? They try to enter into our soul. They are
determined to let their bullets enter our bodies and their spirit our souls. Do
you understand? Our fight against them must be a spiritual fight. We won't
defeat them with our fists, but with our mind!"
After the man cried out this burning appeal, he took a sip from the bottle and
muttered, "There is no future in the Ghetto. No future." Then,
suddenly, one hears songs in Yiddish, people dance and sing. "The SS men in
their black scull-uniforms appear to be amused, some inmates turn their backs,
others clap and join in. A poster is rolled up on stage. "One does not play
theatre in a cemetery!" is written on it.
This macabre scene is from the play "Ghetto" by the Israeli author
Joshua Sobol, performed in Berlin and Hamburg several years ago. It was not
fiction brought onto the stage, but the re-enacted, horrible reality of the year
1943: in the Ghetto of Vilna, where ten of thousands of Jews, crowded together
in the most cramped of spaces and guarded by the SS, dreading being taken away
and killed, theatre was played. "I did not believe my eyes when I saw the
documents from Vilna", Joshua Sobol tells me, whom I meet between two
rehearsals in the Habima-Theatre in Tel Aviv, "and then I knew that this is
a theatre play." What he did not know then: Vilna was everywhere. Like this
or similarly, cabaret was played in ghettos, camps and concentration camps, in
Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, in Mauthausen and Westerbork, in Börgermor and
Esterwegen. Cabaret as an atmospheric drug to keep those destined for death
quiet was first tolerated by the guarding troops, later ordered; cabaret as an
opportunity for survival, as a means of encouragement and act of resistance,
performed by masters in the subject, was on the programme at Auschwitz, Sobibor
and Treblinka until the bitter end.
Hardly any of those who under the gallows fought even for a smile survived the
inferno. Theatre in the cemetery? Viktor Matejka, the Viennese politician for
cultural affairs, flies in a friendly but decisive way into a rage: "One
plays theatre in all kind of places, not only in the cemetery!" As a
"political" prisoner, he had convinced the SS in Dachau to allow them
to play theatre in the courtyard of the camp in the open air. "Hitler's
regime was the biggest despotism one can think of. Everything is allowed.
Theatre and cabaret, whatever you want. Sheer survival was at stake."
Louis de Wijze, today owner of a factory in Nijmegen, agrees. He performed at
the age of 20 in the Dutch transit camp Westerbork, from where the notorious
transports to the east started, at the cabaret stage that was established at the
express wish of the SS by German cabaret masters Willy Rosen and Max Ehrlich:
"You can't explain this afterwards. You are in such a camp. You live from
week to week. Every Tuesday the train arrives. If you are not among those who go
on a transport, you utter a sigh of relief: gone. Without you. You are still
needed, you tell yourself. You received a short delay. Until next Tuesday."
Also later in Auschwitz he tried everything to make himself indispensable, he
played football – "Jews against criminals" – and played cabaret:
"In Monowitz we had somebody who could walk like Chaplin. We laughed tears.
And the morning after they kept hanging people." They wanted to encourage
their co-prisoners to hold out to the end. They wanted to lower the suicide rate
in the camps. And they counted on humour as a weapon and on laughing as a
healing force. Until the bitter end. Only a few days before his death, the
formerly famous entertainer Fritz Grünbaum gave in Dachau his last performance
and made fun of the misery of his situation. His bitter jokes were spread
throughout the camp. Once, when a guard refused to give him a bar of soap, Grünbaum
fretted: "One who has not got enough money for soap, should not keep
concentration camps." He died in 1941 from exhaustion, emaciated to a
skeleton, like his 'KadeKo' colleague Paul Morgan in Buchenwald.
"Nothing went without humour. This is how I managed to survived six years
imprisonment in the KZ", states Erwin Geschonnneck in hindsight, "only
with humour could we drag people out of lethargy and apathy and encourage
them." The later-to-be actor of Brecht and star of the Defa was
artistically active in the camp with and without the permission of the KZ
guards. He played sketches in Dachau and performed as main actor on a stage they
made themselves which signified for him the world, he sang songs from the Three
Penny Opera in Sachsenhausen in secret and recited the tale of the emperor's new
clothes, he composed camp songs in Neuengamme which his Czech co-prisoner and
colleague Emil F. Burian wrote for him: "Our daily bread is hard bread. It
tastes of blood, it tastes of sweat, it tastes of tears." Humour is
laughing despite it all, says Geschonneck, and shows me in Dachau the spot,
where in summer 1943 under the open sky and in front of the SS, performing as
the bloodthirsty knight Adolar he made fun of the Gröfaz [="Grössster Führer
aller Zeiten", biggestest leader of all times, nickname for Adolf Hitler]
of Braunau – next to the barracks where the uniforms of shot co-prisoners
underwent disinfection. The frightening murder spectacle was called "The
Blood Night at the Schreckenstein oder This is not True Love", a spooky
macabre play written by one of the prisoners, the Viennese journalist Rudolf
Kalmar, in the camp. It was modeled after the "Pradler Ritterspiele",
those brash pieces of naive-macabre popular art that are played in Vienna to
this very day in which people plunder, ravage, stab and behead to their
hearts’ content. This only barely disguised satire on Hitler was performed for
six weeks, applauded by the prisoners and smiled at without much understanding
by the SS guards. Then the play was dismissed.
Why they were allowed to play in the first place, is explained by Viktor Matejka:
"Luck in war was declining. We in Dachau were then used for the production
of weapons, we were needed." Humour, satire and irony were used by KZ
inmates already 10 years before as means for moral rearmament. Guenter Daus, old
communist and trade union leader, tells about the beginnings of the so-called
Schutzhaftlager [protective custody camps] in the Emsland, where the Nazis
wanted to re-educate their political enemies immediately after Hitler gained
power. Daus describes what is was like: "It was in summer '33. There was
the night of the long boards: SA people wildly beat on us with sticks in which
they had hammered rusty nails. The aim of this action was to humiliate us, to
take away our self-confidence." Daus and co-inmates fought back – with a
cabaret performance. 'Zirkus Konzentrazani' the colourful programme was called,
which was performed in August on the main square of the camp at Börgermoor
mainly by amateur actors who transcended above their fate with acrobatic
performances, clown games, stale jokes – "Humor is when one is in the Hu!
Moor". Even then, the pros and cons of such KZ activity were intensely
discussed, the critics among them suspecting that the Nazis would use their fun
for propaganda.
"But the success proved us right!" says Guenter Daus. In his voice one
hears even today, after nearly sixty years, defiant pride. At any rate, a song
written in the camp was performed for the first time in this circus performance,
which, smuggled outside the camp by prisoners and taken abroad, soon afterwards
became the musical symbol of anti-fascist resistance: "Die Moorsoldaten".
The camp song was forbidden. And with it the cabaret. But soon afterwards, in
one of the neighbouring moor camps, there was again reason for laughing, if only
for an hour. The short scene, which took place in 1935 in Esterwegen, was
performed by professionals of their metier. Among them were the popular Berlin
cabaret perfomers Werner Finck, Guenther Lueders and Walter Gross, who were
convicted by Goebbels to "six weeks of camp with labour", to make an
example.
It was cabaret by order. The camp authority was bored. Finck joked as he used to
do: "You will ask yourselves why we are so merry and jolly. Well, there are
reasons for that: In Berlin we haven't been like that for a long time. The
opposite is true: every time we performed we had this unpleasant feeling. We
were afraid to come to a KZ. And now, you see, we don't have to be afraid any
longer – we are in a KZ anyway!" Walter Gross also delivered humour,
although he did not feel like it. "We were tormented, day and night. They
woke us up from sleep and ordered us to do knee-bends. They had us cart sand
from one corner of the camp to the other. And then back again." Did he know
then who was responsible for this "special treatment", I ask him.
"Of course. This was Goebbel's own idea. That also become clear in
trial."
The above mentioned trial was held a year later, in October 1936, at a Special
Court in Berlin. The indictment “Violation of the Law of Malice” related to
a piece from "Tingel-Tangel" and a sketch from "Katakombe",
where Finck commented on his raised right hand with "Aufgehobene Rechte"
[a pun which cannot be translated: it means 'raised right (hand)', but also that
rights (laws) no longer exist]. The trial ended with acquittal. But Goebbels had
made his mark. Espeically Werner Finck, whose ability to get stuck in the
thicket of words of his half-finished sentences and who had the audience finish
his muttering sentences, was early on a thorn in the Nazi's side. After Hitler
gained power, his seemingly harmless punch lines were also circulated outside
Berlin. People said that he had asked the police informers who sat in the
audience and wrote down each word, whether they would get along [writing down
his jokes] or whether he had to come along [with them]. Goebbels closed the
cabarets "Katakombe" and "Tingel-Tangel" on 10 May 1935 and
the actors were arrested. I meet the woman who remembers this evening as if it
were yesterday, at the main house of the 'Society of the Nuns of the Holiest
Heart of Jesus" in Bonn. She lives here. Then, more then 50 years ago,
Sister Isa Vermehren stood every evening on the stage as "Göre mit der
Knautschkommode" ('Lass' with the Accordion) and sang
fresh-merry-jolly-freely cunning sailor songs as a 17-year old teenager. "I
arrived, since my slot was usually rather late, at 10, half past 10 to the
cabaret", she recalls, "and everything was dark. There was only a lost
waiter and the chairs were still on the tables. Friends then told me that had
happened: Werner Fincke and Rudolf Platte and all the others were arrested and
the "Katakombe" closed. They urged me to get away from Berlin. That's
what I did."
Not her songs, however, brought her one year before the end of the war to the
concentration camp. The stations of her "journey through the last
act", as she calls it, were Ravensbrueck, Buchenwald and Dachau; the reason
was simple: her brother fled from Ankara to the British-occupied Cairo. This
meant detainment based on kin relations. Cabaret in the KZ? She shakes her head.
"No, no. Ravensbrueck was a pure female camp. There something like that was
not possible. The will to annihilation, which was the basis of these camps, was
obvious. We worked to complete exhaustion. But maybe one reason is that women in
general are less experienced with internment. They were separated from their
families, their children. The disorientation was eminent. Perhaps men have
another way of behaving in a structure such as this." She performed there
once, twice. She sang Bach and Händel and "Die Gedanken sind frei"
[Thoughts are free]. This was like a signal, she says.
Up on the hardly forested hill in front of the gates to Jerusalem I meet Ruth
Elias from Mährisch-Ostrau, who found forty years ago a new home here in
Israel. She brought her accordion with her. Ruth Elias sings the anthem of
Theresienstadt to me, that song which was popular in the Ghetto like no other:
"Hooray, tomorrow life begins, the day comes nearer when we will pack our
bundles and return home. Everything goes if one only wants it. Let's extend our
hands! And we will laugh at the debris of the Ghetto!" These lines
encouraged people, gave them power and assurance, says the woman and looks down
to the valley. There is Yad Vashem, the memorial site for the victims of the
Holocaust. Many of those whose names are registered there died with these lines
on their lips, she says. The Czech comic and cabaret artist, Karel Svenk, who
wrote these lines, could not provide himself with the hope he gave to others.
Tomas Kosta, a native Czech who lives today as publisher in Bergisch Gladbach,
tells me about his end: "I knew him from Theresienstadt, there he played
cabaret revues, wrote the texts and the lyrics and put them on stage. This was
more critical and also more poetic than most of what was offered there. Later we
were together in Auschwitz and its attached camp Meuselwitz. As late as April
1945 we were squeezed together in cattle trains to be brought to Mauthausen.
Karel Svenk could not cope with it. First his spirit left him, then he was
completely confused and also physically exhausted. He died during the transport.
That happened in the vicinity of Karlsberg, during an airplane attack. He was
not yet 40 years old. We buried him next to the railway lines as well as we
could."
The song, which speaks about laughing on the debris of the Ghetto, is finished.
One feels that Ruth Elias has sung it often. She sung it also in the camps, in
Theresienstadt and others. New Year's Eve 1944, for example, it was in the
attached camp Taucha. There the women sat together and started singing songs
from their home countries – Hungary, France, Yugoslavia, Poland,
Czechoslovakia. Ruth Elias wrote a new text to a melody by Lehar: "Here
stands a prisoner in his prisoner's clothes…" This was the only song in
German. "Suddenly the commander of the camp stands behind me. I thought
that this is the end. Then he said to me, 'Within ten days you raise a complete
cabaret programme.' I had never done something like this before and I told him.
Then he snubbed, 'If you don’t obey, you’ll go to jail!’ and left. We
managed to do it together, especially the gypsies were excellent. And the
greatest satisfaction was that the SS who applauded. And we told them between
the lines one thing or another in our language which they could not
understand."
These songs were her only weapon then, she says. "They empowered us."
Ruth Elias needed this power. She survived Auschwitz, gave birth to a child
there. KZ physician Mengele provided for the baby. He forbid the mother to
breastfeed, because he wanted to find out how long it would live without food.
Ruth Elias shortened the struggle of her child: she killed it with her own
hands. She speaks silently about it, nearly detached. She thinks about every
word, says silently what there is to say. And she only speaks about it today.
She kept silent for forty years. Her sons, both in their mid-30s, heard about it
only when she published a report on her life as book two years ago: "Hope
Kept Me Alive." The title is a programme. It could also have been a title
for one of her cabaret performances.
Jetty Cantor of Hilversum, the grand old lady of the Dutch cabaret, sang as well
during all her life against the sorrow inflicted upon her, first the Amsterdam
Ghetto theatre, in which the SS herded the Jews together to send them in cattle
wagons on the transport to the East, then in the KZ, in Westerbork and
Theresienstadt. There she bid her sister with her two young children farewell, a
farewell for good. In autumn 1944 she herself came to Auschwitz: “First they
took my violin away. Then I saw those huge flames and the smoke. I thought that
this is the kitchen for all the many thousand people. But it was the gas
chamber. And then I was called to the rehearsal. Rehearsal? In Auschwitz? Yes,
they said, we should play, in front of the gas chamber. I can’t do this, I
said. Just imagine: my family or friends go into the oven and I play music to
it. Then they fetched me.” She does not know how she survived the prison of
death. She never did. And she never understood what actually happened. “One
day they told me: you are a Jewess. I did not really know what that means. I had
never been in a synagogue.”
When she was freed, she was only skin and bones. Months later she still could
only walk with the help of crutches. “I spent the most beautiful time of my
life in Germany, I went to school there when my mother played theatre there. And
I always loved Germany. It hurt twice as much that it was Germans who did all
this to me.” She knows the Berlin of the early 1930s, recorded records there
and sang for the German radio. Richard Tauber gave her a precious ashtray as a
present. Joseph Schmidt, also famous in those years, had a box of chocolate made
for her because she sang “Ein Stern fällt vom Himmel” (A star falls down
from the sky), his lied, so impressively. She admits today that she preferred to
co-operate with German artists. “They are always so accurate, on time and
precise. Willy Rosen was like that as well. He wrote the most beautiful songs
for me. A fantastic man, a true artist. But all of them were like that.”
All of them, these are the imprisoned artists of Westerbork, the transit camp
close to the German-Dutch border where during World War II more than 100,000
Jews, Dutch and German emigrants were herded together. In the bleak camp in the
heath all the well-known cabaret artists of the cabaret scene of Berlin and
Vienna who fled in 1933 from Hitler to the neighbouring Netherlands were
gathered: the entertainers Max Ehrlich and Franz Engel, the comedian Otto
Wallburg, Hermann Feiner and Josef Baar, the cabaret performers Chaja Goldstein
and Alice Dorell, dancers and musicians such as
Otto Aurich and Erich Ziegler,
the old champions of the cabaret, Rudolf Nelson, the former stars of his Berlin
revues, Camilla Spira and Kurt Gerron and finally Willy Rosen, the
cabaret-playing composer of popular songs, who was one of the main attractions
of the “Kabarett der Komiker” in Berlin with his famous usual announcement
“Text and lyrics by myself”.
SS-Obersturmfuehrer [sergeant major?] Gemmeker, the camp commander, is a friend
of the “light muse”. In the government barracks, from where those sentenced
to death are sent in wagons to Auschwitz and Sobibor, he has a stage built; the
boards used for it are from a demolished synagogue in the nearby town.
Instruments are brought in, the expansive curtains were requisitioned, the
costumes ‘put in safekeeping’ from exclusive fashion shops. The revues which
Max Ehrlich and Willy Rosen perform here in their “Buehne Lager Westerbork”
are called “Humour and Melody”, “Bravo da capo!” or “Totally crazy”.
Westerbork gains the macabre reputation of being the “stronghold of European
cabaret”. Songs from operettas, popular songs, witty couplets and silly
sketches, ballet numbers and performed jokes. And in the first row, surrounded
by his staff: the commander in a big armchair. “And the people laughed and
applauded” – it was like being in Berlin at the Kurfuerstendamm”, recalls
Camilla Spira who sang there once again her successful songs from the “Weisses
Rösl”, “we were suddenly somewhere else. You can’t imagine that. The
people down there, they forgot everything during those two hours.”
Etty Hillesum kept a diary in Westerbork until her deportation. “Oh dear”,
is written there, “the hall is crowded to capacity. And one laughs tears, yes,
tears!” Philipp Mechanicus notes shortly before his deportation: “All of us
sit in dirt up to our neck and one sings nevertheless. A psychological riddle.
Operetta next to an open grave… Making fun, one sounds the death-haloo.” One
plays always, when transports arrive or leave for the East. “That was the most
horrible thing,” says Jetty Cantor, “how often we had to say good-bye to
parents and siblings, to good friends and acquaintances at the train. How can
you go back to the stage, be funny and make people laugh afterwards?” Those
who performed in the cabaret hoped for better chances for survival. Willy Rosen,
for example, wrote for the camp stage: “Life makes no sense for those who
don’t have luck. If you haven’t got luck, you slip and fall over. So I ask
you, Fortuna, be faithful, touch wood, touch wood, toi-toi-toi!” Max Ehrlich
showed optimism as a post coachman in biedermeyer style: “Always slowly
forwards, always with good nature, it’s not time yet, we still have time.”
In the beginning of August 1944 time had come. Commander Gemmeker closed the
camp theatre and sent its actors on transport, railway wagons rolled via
Theresienstadt to Auschwitz. “He smiled us to Auschwitz”, said Jetty Castor
bitterly. And Camilla Spira adds: “Max Ehrlich, Willy Rosen, Franz Engel, Otto
Wallburg – all murdered. All.” When Jetty Castor arrived in Theresienstadt,
she met many acquaintances from better days. Here they performed as well, played
theatre, played music, danced and sang. An enormous cultural variety, from
symphony concerts, operas, operettas, lectures and cabarets, is meant to give
the ghetto impression of being an exemplary camp and deceive international aid
organisations about the real fate Jews were facing there. A farce. Cabaret
groups played in basements, in back yards and lofts. One can hear a jazz band
playing the “Negro music”, hated by the Nazis, in a coffeehouse – with the
“Tiger Rag” and the “St. Louis Blues”. Here Cantor begins as a singer.
I meet the bandleader of the “Ghetto Swingers” in Emerson, a little place on
the American West Coast. Martin Roman, also far into his 80s, recalls the order:
“The commander had told me: I want you to sound American and to swing. You
have to jazz, so that sparks and ties will fly..” Martin Roman is a
professional musician, he was a pianist with the world-famous “Weintraub
Syncopators” and played in the orchestra of Marek Weber and later travelled
Europe with his own band. One can hardly count the camps he survived: Vught,
Westerbork and Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Oranienburg, Sachsenhausen, Kaufering
and in the end there was the death march to Wolfratshausen. He survived
everything, he says, with music. “Music saved my life.” In Theresienstadt he
was once called to the commander: “That was an SS-Obersturmbannfuehrer
[sergeant-major?]. His name was Rahm. He told me: Roman, I have another task for
you. I want to have a new cabaret. Its name is ‘Karussell’ [roundabout].
Kurt Gerron is the director, you know him from Holland. You will make the music
to it.” Co-operation with Gerron was just wonderful, says Roman. He tries to
remember playing at the untuned piano: “We ride on wooden horses and are
swirled around, only when we stop dizzly, we will see where we stand.” Kurt
Gerron sang the song on the round-about himself, alsoi songs from the
Three-Penny Opera.
Annie Frey, living in the Viennese Hutweidengasse, remembers it well. Above her
bed-sofa hangs a drawing with a dedication: “For my dear colleague with my
sincere thanks for your wonderful co-operation on the premiere of the ‘Karussell’.
Theresienstadt, 3 May 1944. Kurt Gerron.” The famous artist, cabaretist and
director, who had played Tiger Brown in the Berlin first performance of the
Three Penny Opera and who stood in front of the UFA camera as cabaret director
in the ‘Blauer Engel’ with Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings, found a task
again. He cared for everything, organised, initiated and fought. “He insisted
that each of us get a large, spacious warderobe,” says Annie Frey. “Where
would you have that?”
Also the Schönova, Vlasta Schön of Prague, then in her early 20s, played
theatre in Theresienstadt. First in her mother tongue, then in German. Her best
role was the ‘Loved Voice’ of Cocteau. “I have been asking myself for the
last forty years why we did that. Because the audience wanted it? Because the
actors wanted to play? Yes, I wanted to play. That was my life!” Nava Shan, as
she is called since she moved to Israel after her liberation, relates an
incident which nearly put off one of her premieres. “It was after the dress
rehearsal. We went to the loft where we wanted to play and saw that our stage
was full of dead bodies. Fifty or sixty, nobody knew where they came from. We
asked the blind people living in this house to form a line and take the bodies
out. The premiere was held as planned.” Kurt Gerron wanted her for his “Karussell”,
but that was too nostalgic for her. “’Cabaret statt Kabarett’ [‘cabaret
is apolitical, entertainment only, while ‘Kabarett’ has got a critical,
political view]. In my opinion that was sticking to the past, in the so-called
good old times. We theatre people preferred to think about the future. We
rehearsed what we wanted to play in Prague after the war.” When the
delegations of the Red Cross arrived, the fat was in the fire. “At each
corner, music was played, without pausing. Like in an amusement park. It was
horrible. People were fooled by this.”
Then Himmler had the idea to make a propaganda movie, in which Theresienstadt,
this waiting room for the trip into death, should be marketed as the “Paradise
Ghetto Theresienbad”. The cruel idea: Jews should manage it by themselves.
Kurt Gerron was chosen, the experienced UFA director. The film title was “The
Fuehrer gives the Jews a town.” Gerron obeyed. The Ghetto, in which more than
30,000 died, in which one did not live but vegetate, in which diseases, fame and
frost raged, this ghetto, from where more than 80,000 people were deported to
death camps, became a film scene in late summer 1944.
Old and sick people were deported to Auschwitz to free up space. Parcels were
distributed which were not to be opened, bread which was not to be eaten, cigars
which were not to be smoked. Theresienstadt – a “Potemkin village”.
“Gerron forgot everything around him. He stuck obstinately to his new task,
was the big director, played Hollywood.” The person saying this is Coco
Schumann, who came to the camp as a 17-year old. The very young piano player
started as a drummer for the ‘Ghetto Swingers’, his predecessor had been
deported. A pavilion was built for the band at the market square, they received
white shirts – everything for the movie. “It was one big lie”, says Coco,
“and everybody knew it.” Later he had to play in Auschwitz for the SS and in
front of the gas chamber: “La Paloma” and “Alte Kameraden”. [Old
Comrades, a song commemorating war camaraderie]
I walk with Lisl Hofer through Theresienstadt. The streets are empty. At the
market square plays loud rock music from loudspeaker boxes, some twenty, thirty
teenagers stand around rather aimlessly. Lisl Hofer is looking for the house in
which she used to live then. “Lived”. “We vegetated like animals. 18, 20
people in a single room. Among them old people, sick, dying. Simply misery.”
When she found the house, we enter the inner court. The current tenants are
suspicious. She tries to explain. Ghetto? They do not understand her. They only
know about the little fortress outside town. There was once the “princip”
imprisoned, the one who fired the shots in Sarajevo; that’s how, so one says,
the first world war started. Later on the fascists tortured communist resistance
fighters. That’s about all.
Lisl Hofer was a beginning soubrette when the Germans marched into Austria. She
went then to Prague, met Hans Hofer and married him. One from the Hofer dynasty,
all of them gifted comedians. They had a cabaret together in Theresienstadt, the
Hofer cabaret – entertaining, Viennese songs, operettas, something for the
people. Today she lives in Rostock. We try to enter the Hamburg barracks where
Gerron’s cabaret was located. Only a few weeks ago this would not have been
possible – since the end of the war the army has been there again.
Theresienstadt, initially built as a fortress, is again what it was meant to be
from the very beginning: an army base. The press officer is understanding, after
some to and fro we are allowed to enter: an empty inner court. In the long
corridors listless recruits. Nothing apart from them.
Lisl Hofer speaks about the propaganda movie. Hans Hofer was there as Gerron’s
assistant director. He also appeared with his cabaret in front of the camera,
outside in the gorge of Drabschitz. It was not done in high spirits – the SS
stood behind the camera with drawn guns.
We return to the hotel in Prague. I have got an appointment with Ivan Fric, the
Czech camera man who filmed then, at the age of 22, under Gerron’s direction,
the propaganda movie. In the lobby of the hotel I meet Tomas Kosta who had told
me about the life and death of Karel Svenk. “The film was a lie and we knew
that. Gerron fooled himself, he hoped to be able to save his life.” Günter
Grass and Walter Höllerer join in – they will give a prize to their colleague
Vaclav Havel at the Hradschin the next day. But Kosta has got another reason to
visit his old home country. He wants to show his adult children the place to
which he was deported as a 17-year old. “Do you know it?” he asks me. “I
come from there. “ “You were in the Ghetto?” “Yes.” “What is your
impression?” “My impression is that the people living there today have not
got a clue where they are.” “True. I will speak about this with my Czech
friends. The small fortress is a memorial for political prisoners. In the Ghetto
itself there is no single sign, nothing commemorating the fact that tens of
thousands of Jews were brought together from the whole of Europe to deport them
to Auschwitz. That was in the line of the old political regime. This is also
something which has to be taken care of now.”
In the meantime Ivan Fric has arrived, agile in his late 60s. He speaks about
the humiliations which the US inflicted upon the former UFA star. They insisted
that he personally perform as well, also in front of the camera. Gerron
perspired, was ill, sang Mackie Messer, tried all the tricks of his popular art,
tried to make some jokes – the audience ordered to be there did not move and
sat there silently.
Then he was sent away, says Fric. The film was finished without him. With the
last big transport, in October 1944, straight to Auschwitz. Straight into the
gas chamber. “I saw him in Theresienstadt at the ramp”, says Vlasta Schön.
“The train was ready to leave. Gerron fell on his knees and asked for
permission to stay. He said: I made this movie for you! The SS boots kicked him
inside the wagon.”
They played for their life. They gave hope and confidence to themselves and to
others, even then, when everything was lost. They did not want to believe it.
Gerron’s colleague Kurt Kapper, an author for cabaret as well, then wrote the
bitter necrolog, anticipating evil for himself and his kind: “We thank you,
good Jew, we say it to you frankly: pack your suitcases now, be so kind, because
you are now in line for Poland.”
The few who survived the inferno are still at a loss. “I don’t understand
it”, says Louis de Wijze, “how is that possible. Those wonderful artists.
What they achieved then. Under these conditions. Then, then the play was over
and one did not need them any longer, one says, thank you and simply puts them
into the oven?” “A nightmare”, says Jetty Cantor in Hilversum. “And you
dream about it again and again. But the worst is that you wake up, wet with
perspiration, and you know that is not a bad dream, no, it was really like
that.”
A journey is coming to its end. The attempted approach to a past, which was once
the present of our parents and grandparents. A nightmare without moral. There
are only questions without an answer. “I know only one thing”, says Annie
Frey of Vienna. “Singing saved my life. More than once.”
-------------------------------
Translated in to English by Nancy Chapple
-----------------------------
Dirk Mulder, Ben Prinsen (eds.), Lachen im Dunkeln. Amüsement im Lager
Westerbork, Münster 1997, p. 15-31.
Otto & Lisl at Kamp Westerbork
Otto & Lisl Internet References
Return to Aufrichtigs Home Page