Clara did not
spend long in Theriesenstadt. Just under a month in fact. But I’ve been very
concerned about getting the detail about that stay right. We always assume it
to have been a more benign place than many other camps and indeed at the time
that Clara was there it was more of a transit camp than anything else though it
also provided cheap labour for a country at war.
We have little idea
of what it was actually like for her in the camp. And in my story-line I’ve included
some fictitious characters – a pregnant mother who gives birth in the camp and her
little daughter. I’ve borrowed a businessman who carried on running his
business from within the camp. This man really existed and he was able to influence
his captors. Here, I’ve used his influence to spare the lives of Clara’s friends
and her two children.
But was Theriesenstadt
all that benign actually? Probably not at the time that Clara was there. It
wasn’t a death camp – a gas chamber was added much later. Neither was it the “holiday
camp” fabricated for the Red Cross, nor were there yet football matches or an orchestra.
Compared with Clara’s former upper middle class lift it would be pretty
miserable there. Am I getting that across?
I’m currently
reading Primo Levi’s If This is a Man /The Truce where we have a detailed picture of what Auschwitz was like
towards the end of World War II. People had ways of surviving. Levi was enterprising
and sold flints he “stole” from his work place and “sold” them for bread. Clara
doesn’t survive but by being such a nice person sets everything up for her friends
to survive. She is so good to everyone that she brings out the best in them.
Levi writes about
Auschwitz, which we all believe to be possibly the worst of the death camps. I
think I’ve made Theriesenstadt as gruesome. Clara’s family believed for years
that she was transported to Auschwitz. We have recently found out, in fact,
that it was Treblinka.
It’s likely that she
and all the other old people in that transport would have been shot on arrival.
They would probably not have known what was happening or not until the last
moment. This was actually a quicker death than being gassed which at that time
took on average twenty minutes. We don’t see that particular scene in my
version of Clara’s story. In the epilogue the two children are now quite grown
up and help with archiving of information about the Rexingen Jews. At that
point they believe that she went to Auschwitz. Only in the notes at the end,
and here, do I reveal that where she actually she went.
