“A Joyful Act of Worship”: Survivor Testimony on Czech Culture in the Terezín Ghetto and Postwar Reintegration in Czechoslovakia, 1945–48 (2012)

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“A Joyful Act of Worship”: SurvivorTestimony on Czech Culture in the TerezínGhetto and Postwar Reintegration inCzechoslovakia, 1945–48

Lisa A. PeschelUniversity of York

This article examines memoirs by three survivors of the Terezín

(Theresienstadt) ghetto, and especially their testimony about the cultural

life of the ghetto, in the context of postwar reintegration. Czech Jewish

survivors of the concentration camps returned to a society very different

from the prewar Czechoslovakia they remembered. Many found them-

selves struggling to adapt to the rejection of German-language culture,

the shift to the political Left, and postwar antisemitism. The authors of

these memoirs were bilingual and thus represented both Czech- and

German-language prewar cultures. In their memoirs, they described their

intense love of the specifically Czech works performed in Terezín. In doing

so, they attempted to establish common ground with their non-Jewish

fellow Czechs and to overcome the suspicion engendered by their prewar

association with German-language culture.

Many of the Czech Jews who survived internment in the World War II ghetto atTerezín returned to a world they hardly recognized.1 The Czechoslovakia most ofthem remembered, and the home to which they had longed to return, was the inter-war First Republic. Rabbi Dr. Richard Feder wrote in the opening paragraph of his1947 memoir: “We Jews lived peacefully and safely and therefore contentedly andhappily in the First Republic…. We were her citizens with full rights, and not onlyon paper, but in real life. We had the same responsibilities, but also the same rightsas other citizens, and we could, without disadvantage, declare as our nationalityCzech, Slovak, German, Hungarian, even Jewish.”2

In the 1930 Czechoslovak census, the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia—the twowesternmost provinces of Czechoslovakia, from which the majority of Terezín pris-oners had been deported—had chosen almost evenly among Czech, German, andJewish “nationality” (ethnic identity).3 They had enjoyed other freedoms of self-definition as well. Most spoke Czech or German or both. Politically, they had beenmembers and supporters of political parties ranging from the Communist Party tothe conservative Agrarian Party. They represented religious viewpoints from

doi:10.1093/hgs/dcs032Holocaust and Genocide Studies 26, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 209–228 209

Orthodoxy to atheism, and some, as members of various Zionist organizations, hadsupported secular Jewish nationalism. Anti-Jewish sentiment was not unknown inthe First Republic, but many, like Feder, considered Czech antisemitism a “weak”phenomenon, “completely dependent upon German [antisemitism].”4 Most ofCzechoslovakia’s approximately 350,000 Jews trusted in the moral and political lead-ership of its first president, Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, who had amply demon-strated his willingness to speak out against antisemitism.5

Upon their return, survivors were confronted with a radically limited range ofacceptable ways to “be Czechoslovak.” Six years of Nazi occupation and a wave ofnew laws enacted by the recently restored government had fundamentally changedthe political, economic, and social character of the state and its people. The widevariety of interwar political parties was replaced by only four Czech parties thatranged from left to center; right-wing parties were banned.6 New economic policiesled to the nationalization of certain industries and the confiscation of property,including “Nazi” property that had been confiscated earlier from the Jews.7 Perhapsmost problematic, however, were the new citizenship laws. In order to ridCzechoslovakia of its “politically unreliable” ethnic German minority, the govern-ment decreed that the formerly multinational state was to become a national stateof Czechs and Slovaks. The 22 percent of Czechoslovak citizens who had declaredGerman nationality in the 1930 census lost their right to citizenship, and in amassive population transfer lasting from January through November 1946, morethan two million people were deported to the American and Soviet Zones inGermany.8

The law, Decree 33, included specific provisions to protect those who had suf-fered under Nazi terror; Jews and anti-fascist ethnic Germans who lost their citizen-ship had the right to apply to have it restored. However, ambiguous wording in thelaw allowed for an unfortunate degree of interpretation on the part of local and dis-trict administrators. Some of the “legal” problems caused by these ambiguities werethus actually the result of new forms of discrimination. According to writer andtranslator Pavel Eisner, these new forms were not “simple antisemitism” but a kindof “cryptoracism.”9 By September of 1946, when the Ministry of the Interior issueda decree clarifying the status of “people of Jewish origin,” approximately 1,500 Jewsapplying to retain their Czechoslovak citizenship had been investigated for “nationalreliability” and had faced the possibility of deportation to Germany.10

Czech Jews did not encounter the same level of hostility as those returning toPoland or Slovakia, but the blow was all the more devastating because, for many, itwas completely unexpected.11 Kurt Wehle, secretary of the postwar JewishCommunity in Prague, recalled his experiences on a more personal level: “To besure, I felt touched and comforted when a Gentile friend came and returned to mea suit which I had given him as a gift before my deportation. But on the otherhand, imagine my feeling when, waiting in a long line outside the housing

210 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

department, I heard a woman say, ‘Just look at all those Jews! There must havebeen some leaks in those gas chambers. It looks as if more Jews got back than therewere here to start with.’”12

Some survivors changed their surnames and even their language to try to inte-grate themselves into the new order. The Jewish Religious Community assistedmembers with their applications for citizenship and offered Czech language coursesfor “Jews with languages other than Czech as their mother tongue.”13 Others tookon new political commitments. Pavel Eisner, apparently motivated by sincere ideal-ism, joined the Communist Party.14 Just seven months later, deeply frustrated bythe discrimination he continued to encounter, he concluded a passionate essay onthe world’s unwillingness to accept the Jewish assimilant by signing “in the name ofall pariahs of the world.”15

Not all the Terezín survivors, however, were ready to accept pariah status.Some, in addition to changing their own ways of “being Czechoslovak,” also tried tochange the attitudes of their fellow Czechs. In this article I will examine three survi-vors’ memoirs as attempts to effect an elusive yet invaluable social change: that is,to generate feelings of solidarity toward Jews among Czech non-Jews. At a timewhen the lack of such solidarity—especially on the part of the local administratorswho were rejecting their applications for citizenship—could potentially mean depor-tation, this was by no means a trivial endeavor. The authors of the only threememoirs published in the immediate postwar period by Terezín survivors over sixtyyears of age—translator Anna Aurednícková, Rabbi Dr. Richard Feder, andProfessor Emil Utitz—took an approach that was much more sophisticated than anovert appeal. Their memoirs constituted a public performance of belonging toCzechoslovak society, and their vividly emotional descriptions of Czech musical andtheatrical performances in the Terezín ghetto played a key role in the potential per-suasiveness of that performance.

As sociologist Vikki Bell argues, belonging is a “performative achievement”constituted through the ways that identities are embodied and enacted.16 Eisner’sexperience demonstrates, however, that simply enacting a particular identity is notenough to effect belonging to a group; the performance must be accepted by thosewho already belong. Thus the survivors’ memoirs had to be performative in termsof embodying an acceptable form of identity, but also performative in J.L. Austin’ssense of an utterance that effects change. If the survivors could craft memoirs thatsuccessfully evoked feelings of solidarity toward them among non-Jewish Czechs,then those feelings could potentially lead to more concrete gestures of acceptance.Perhaps their fellow Czechs would begin to interpret the laws in the Jews’ favor,and perhaps painful comments like the one Wehle had overheard would stop.Perhaps the right narrative would enable them to reintegrate themselves intopostwar society and would restore the sense of belonging they had enjoyed duringthe First Republic.

“A Joyful Act of Worship” 211

The very act of writing a memoir was a performance of belonging in itself, forso-called “prison literature” (vezenská literatura) was a tremendously popular genrein postwar Czechoslovakia. Journalist Václav Behounek, in a survey of suchmemoirs, estimated that more than 100 titles had been published by 1947. The vastmajority were written not by Jews, but by former political prisoners who had sur-vived Nazi concentration camps and prisons. A few were authored by young CzechJewish survivors, many of whom were committed leftists and thoroughly assimilatedto Czech-language culture.17

The narratives of the former political prisoners—most of them young men—shared many features. One common focus was the phenomenon of Czech culturalperformances in the camps—performances that the authors often described as aform of resistance against “Germanization.”18 The writers’ accounts of theatricalperformance in particular enabled them to affiliate themselves with specific politicalpositions, for all of the postwar political parties were heavily invested in the questionof control over postwar theater.19 The Communists’ efforts to gain influence overartists and even to nationalize Czechoslovak theaters began soon after the libera-tion.20 Their opponents, however, successfully rallied and prevented attempts tobring all the theaters in the state—professional and amateur—under the control ofthe Communist-led Ministry of Education and Culture. Public debates often foundpoliticians, artists, and the public divided into two camps over the question ofwhether artists should serve a particular party or remain independent, criticalvoices.21

Memoirs by both the older and younger generations of Terezín survivors, onthe other hand, shared certain features that did not appear in the non-Jewishauthors’ narratives. For example, many of the former political prisoners emphasizedthe severity of their wartime suffering in order to legitimate various postwar politicalgoals.22 The Jews, however, rarely emphasized the special status of their own perse-cution, focusing instead on solidarity with other Czechs victimized during the war.Jewish authors also stressed their conformity to the new, acceptable forms of iden-tity, emphasizing their loyalty to the Czech nation and a leftist political stance.However, the generations diverged in their approach to describing the cultural lifeof the ghetto. The younger survivors performed their solidarity with non-JewishCzechs by linking their descriptions of Czech cultural performance to sharedpostwar political goals. The older survivors’ memoirs reveal a different strategy:their performance of belonging was based on emotional rather than politicalaffiliation.

For the older generation, the appeal to shared pleasure in specifically Czechworks of art may actually have been the most effective possible strategy forreintegration—especially for the three authors in question, who had been publicfigures before the war and thus had limited opportunities to reinvent themselvespolitically in a believable way. As cultural studies scholar Sara Ahmed writes,


emotions represented in texts that circulate in the public sphere help determinewho is an insider and who is an outsider in society; these emotions “create the veryeffect of the surfaces and boundaries that allow us to distinguish an inside and anoutside in the first place.”23 Texts that generate fear of a particular group—forexample, fear of Czechoslovakia’s ethnic Germans as a threat to the state—also gen-erate clearly defined boundaries between a “we” who must protect ourselves and a“they” who must be kept on the outside. Texts that describe pleasure, on the otherhand, tend to establish more porous boundaries and create a “we” of all those whoshare in that pleasure.24

Readers would have had little reason to doubt these older survivors’ expres-sions of pleasure in Czech performance, for all three were bilingual and had actedas ambassadors between the Czech- and German-language cultures during the FirstRepublic. As a translator, Aurednícková had popularized many Czech works forGerman readers; Feder had written books of religious instruction in Czech andGerman; and Utitz had published his academic works in both languages. Thus theirdescriptions of the intense pride, love, and longing they had felt during specificallyCzech performances in the ghetto had the potential to create insider status forthem in postwar society. By emphasizing their own feelings of solidarity withnon-Jews, and their conformity to new nationally Czech and politically leftist stand-ards of identity, and, above all, by publicly performing their deep love of Czechculture, this generation of survivors crafted narratives that had the potential to gen-erate a much-needed sense of solidarity among their fellow Czechs.

Anna AuredníckováA well-known translator of Czech literature into German, Anna Aurednícková(1873–1957) popularized numerous Czech authors, including Jan Neruda, AloisJirásek, František Langer, and the Capek brothers, among German-languagereaders. Although Jewish according to Nazi racial laws, she was a baptized and prac-ticing Catholic who participated in the religious life of Christians in the ghetto.25

She was deported to Terezín on August 3, 1942. Her book Tri léta v Terezíne(Three Years in Terezín) was published in 1945.26

Aurednícková wrote her memoir immediately after the war, when the fate ofJews of German nationality was most uncertain, and the pages practically vibratewith the urgency of her need to perform her Czech identity. In the very first sen-tences of the book, Aurednícková placed herself in solidarity with other Czechs whohad suffered during the war. She identified Terezín as a concentration camp, butcalled it “mild… in comparison with so many other places where there was no hopeof return, where only death meant freedom from torture.”27 Just a few lines latershe described the moment her transport order was delivered: “[The doorbell’s]ringing alone meant fear—fear was the watchword of that terrible period. TheGermans wanted to strike terror in all whom they oppressed. I was afraid, like


millions of others during those years.”28 By describing her fear as an emotionshared with her fellow Czechs during the Nazi occupation, she positioned herself asan insider within that community.

Indeed, the collective narrative Aurednícková created was clearly about “weCzechs” rather than “we Jews.” Her affiliation with all things Czech saturated thenarrative from its smallest details (for example, frequent use of personal pronounsand possessives such as “we Czechs” and “our excellent artists”) to its broadestthemes (her loyalty to President Masaryk and his successor, Eduard Beneš).Although her prewar past was unmistakably bourgeois and afforded her limitedroom to maneuver in terms of refashioning herself as a leftist, she did describeherself as “socially oriented,” and claimed that “in Terezín I wanted only to servethe poor and to try to distract the sick and blind from the misery of their lives.”29

Her performances of loyalty to specifically Czech culture were much moreprominent, however. As she recalled, the cultural life of the ghetto had virtuallysaved her life. Aurednícková, a widow, was deported alone to Terezín during aperiod when the ghetto’s resources were strained to the breaking point: in thesummer and fall of 1942, thousands of elderly Jews from Germany and Austria weredeported to Terezín and the mortality rate there rose sharply. She described thefirst weeks of hunger and loneliness there as an experience that brought her to thebrink of suicide. When a chance conversation in a Terezín clinic led her to mentionher prewar literary work to one of the nurses, she began to receive invitations tospeak. As word spread about her talents as a lecturer, she added educational pro-grams for children and youth to her repertoire.30 Records preserved in the TerezínMemorial support her claim that she gave 348 lectures in the ghetto.31

Some of her most vivid descriptions were devoted to the experience of listen-ing to Czech music. While briefly acknowledging that other national groups wererepresented in cultural life in Terezín, she left no doubt as to her own affiliation:

I heard beautiful concerts, evenings of chamber music, which were truly a pleasure.Those good musicians were for the most part my [Czech] countrymen. It was a holidaywhen, for an over-full hall, they played Dvorák, Smetana; works of composers of othernationalities were however played as well. But when some Dvorák quartet or Smetana’s“From My Life” sounded, we, the Czechs, were ecstatic.32 If Ancerl conducted Czechcompositions, the audience was glad; it was not only a pleasure for our hearing, butour spirits quivered at the sound, full of longing and love for the beloved homeland.33

Just as she placed herself among the thousands of Czechs who feared a knock atthe door during the occupation, she placed herself in the Terezín audience among“we, the Czechs,” and invited readers to share in the pleasure that the titles ofthose well-known works evoked. They might also have shared national pride inKarel Ancerl, a conductor for Czechoslovak radio and, earlier, for the belovedLiberated Theater of Jirí Voskovec and Jan Werich. The enjoyment expressed in


her narrative had the potential to open boundaries by fostering the reader’s senseof solidarity with the prisoners—solidarity inspired by a common love for the“homeland.”

Aurednícková was aware of the theatrical works staged in the ghetto, but appa-rently did not attend Czech-language theater; she mentioned, however, that theNazis tolerated performances of plays by Karel Capek only because they did notknow the meaning of his works.34 She was silent on the topic of German-languagetheater, although other sources hint at just how much it meant to her. For example,her fellow prisoner Philipp Manes, an organizer of German-language cultural activ-ities in the ghetto, described in his diary a successful staged reading of Goethe’sFaust, part II, in July of 1944.35 Reporting that the audience was struck by “thebeauty of the language” and “the deeply gripping final scenes,” he reproduced, withgreat pride, a letter of thanks written by Aurednícková. She wrote: “The Faustevening was, for me and the whole circle of my friends, a great pleasure.… Thewonderful words of Goethe are always an experience.… I thank you… for devotingyourself to such performances, and with such humble means transporting the listen-ers to another world.”36

In the postwar period, given her urgent need to demonstrate her affiliation toCzech-language culture, Aurednícková could ill afford to wax poetic about her admi-ration of Goethe’s work. Although she mentioned that she had met Philipp Manesand had tried to obtain a ticket to the reading of Faust, she did not record her

Still photograph from the Nazi propaganda film “Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt” (TheFührer Gives the Jews a City). Karel Ancerl conducts the Theresienstadt orchestra. Ancerl, who hadbeen the conductor of the Radiojournal Orchestra for Czechoslovak radio symphony, survived the warand became the conductor of the Toronto symphony. USHMM, courtesy of Ivan Vojtech Fric.


subsequent attendance, much less her reaction. Instead she focused on the fact thatManes shared a surname with renowned Czech painter Josef Manes (1820–1871)and that he invited her to lecture to his German-speaking audience about Czech lit-erature. She accepted the invitation right away, since, as she wrote, “it was alreadymy intention.”37

Aurednícková devoted little attention in her memoir to the liberation of theghetto. She briefly described the chaotic events that took place in the final days ofthe war: rumors that the Nazis planned to kill all the prisoners, the SS officersfleeing the ghetto, the health care personnel who arrived to try to prevent thespread of typhus.38 She did not continue her account chronologically into thepostwar period. However, the liberation was by no means the end of her narrative.Almost fifty additional pages follow in which she described other features of life inthe ghetto. Most striking is her penultimate chapter, titled “What my listeners mostwanted to hear.”39 Here she related various stories she had told during her lecturesin Terezín—stories she had selected perhaps not only because they were what theTerezín prisoners wanted to hear, but because they might interest her postwarreaders as well. For example, she told of meeting President Masaryk, whosememory was venerated across the political spectrum after the war, and devoted twopages to personal anecdotes about actors of the Czech National Theater.40 Perhapsin deference to the widespread postwar enthusiasm for Russian culture, she claimedto have spoken to her Terezín listeners about the “the crown of all actorly art—Russian theater.”41

Her narrative ended with a final gesture of solidarity with non-Jewish Czechs:a paean to the Prague Uprising, which began on May 5, 1945. She described ayoung Czech man, a family friend, who brought her packages immediately after theSS fled the ghetto but who was killed just a few days later during the final struggle.She devoted the last few sentences of her memoir to him: “He defended Prague onthe barricades with a weapon in his hands… and he fell. One of the heroes of ourrevolution. I gratefully remember him.… [He] heroically fought for our freedom.”42

She thus ended with a description of her own personal connection to this event—and with a final performance of belonging to the Czech national community, com-memorating “our revolution” and sharing in “our freedom.”43

Aurednícková’s book represented an intensely personal project of manifestingher own belonging in postwar Czechoslovakia. Rabbi Dr. Richard Feder also drewon testimony about the ghetto’s cultural life to create a performative narrative, butone with a much larger goal: to reintegrate not just himself but the remnants ofCzechoslovak Jewry, now a tiny minority, into postwar society.

Rabbi Dr. Richard FederRabbi Dr. Richard Feder (1875–1970) was raised in a Czech-speaking family inVáclavice near Benešov but attended German-language schools and completed his


university and rabbinical studies in Vienna. His published works, mostly textbooksfor Hebrew language and Jewish religious instruction, appeared before and afterWorld War I in both Czech and German. In 1917 he became the rabbi of theJewish congregation in Kolín. In June of 1942 he and his wife Hilda (1888–1942)were deported along with the entire Kolín congregation to Terezín; their adult chil-dren, Rút, Viktor, and Evžen also were sent to the ghetto. His wife died in Terezínsix months after their arrival; his children and their families perished after deporta-tion to Auschwitz. His book Židovská tragedie: Dejství poslední (A Jewish Tragedy:The Last Act) was published in 1947.

As an official representative and leader of the postwar Jewish community,Feder occupied a position very different from that of Aurednícková. Rather thanspeak for himself as an individual, Feder almost always wrote as the representativeof a specifically Jewish “we”: at times the Kolín or the Czechoslovak Jews, at timesall the prisoners of Terezín, at times the Jews of Europe as a whole. While describ-ing “the last act” of European Jewry, and dealing with an enormous burden of per-sonal loss, he crafted a narrative with features that had the potential to generatefeelings of sympathy and solidarity for the remnants of his flock among non-JewishCzechs.

While Aurednícková began her narrative at the moment when her transportorder was delivered—at the point when her Nazi-imposed Jewishness irrevocablyseparated her fate from that of her fellow Czechs—Feder started at a much earlierpoint: the period of the First Republic, when the Czech Jews enjoyed a position ofrespect and equality. Although he clearly valued the Jews’ freedom to choose theirown cultural, religious, and political affiliations, he devoted special attention to the“Czechness” of the Czech Jews. For example, in his list of Jewish contributions toCzechoslovak culture, all the authors he mentioned wrote in the Czech language:“All Czechs… enjoyed seeing in the theater… the works of František Langer [and]read with pleasure the works of Vojtech Rakous and Karel Polácek.”44 Thus hereminded readers that the Jews not only valued the same beloved works ofCzech-language culture as non-Jews, but that they had participated in creatingthem.

Feder also placed the Jews in an acceptably leftist position. He countered thestereotype of Jewish wealth and bourgeois mindset by describing a wide range ofclass and party affiliations: “We were active mainly in business and industry, but wedid not take up leading positions.… Jewish youth demonstrated—why would I hideit today?—an inclination to Communism, but in the party of two red carnations theydid not stand in the front ranks. Young Jews had a downright distaste for businessand devoted themselves instead to trades.”45

As his narrative progressed and he described the period of the occupation andthe beginning of deportations, he returned to the topic of the Jews’ sense of


belonging to the Czech homeland, emphasizing the pain of being banished from itby the Nazi occupiers:

Then the Germans took away from the Jew even the last thing he still had, his home—that home with all its charms, that home where his ancestors had lived for many gener-ations… [that home] where he was born, grew up, was educated, did military service;where he married and had children and raised them.…Where he had thousands ofacquaintances and hundreds of friends, whose language he spoke, whose songs hesang, whose music he listened to and passionately loved, whose ideals he supported—that home with which he was linked with all his being.46

Feder did not present an abstract love of country but rather a list of the specifics ofbelonging: a whole network of emotional connections that linked the Jews with theland and their countrymen. Czech culture played a prominent role in that networkof shared affiliation; the language and music they “passionately loved” were integralelements of the Czech Jews’ sense of belonging to the Czech national community.

Feder mentioned the cultural life of the ghetto at several points in his narra-tive. Although he described performances in German and those with specificallyJewish themes as well, his most extensive description focused on Czech-languageworks familiar to non-Jewish audiences:

Singers, among them even one from Kolín, Franta Weissenstein, rehearsed TheBartered Bride and played it in concert version fifty times. Even German Jews who didnot understand a word of Czech tried to get tickets to this opera…. Then Wolker’sThe Tomb was performed, as well as Camel through a Needle’s Eye, The Third Ring,and others. For youth the old Play about Queen Esther was performed and Krása’sbeautiful children’s opera Brundibár. That was a true sensation for Terezín and waseven admired by the Germans.… Fireflies, which was played later, was also very beauti-ful…. Very beloved was Švenk’s cabaret. Those boys made brilliant jokes aboutTerezín conditions and had both legs in the Small Fortress [i.e. would have beenseverely punished if caught]. German cabaret was often staged in the courtyards, sothat all had a chance to hear it. Song and music were the best medicine for the melan-choly of our hearts, even if it did not bring healing, but only momentary relief.47

With this passage, Feder opened a window onto an astonishingly active culturalscene. The Bartered Bride was considered by many to be the Czech national opera.Many of the plays he mentioned were favorites in the prewar Czech-language reper-toire; Fireflies was based on a well-known Czech children’s story.48 UnlikeAurednícková, who conveyed a sense of ecstasy when describing the music sheheard in the ghetto, Feder’s main feeling appeared to be one of almost fatherlypride, not only in the richness of the offerings but in the fact that the German Jews,and even the Nazis themselves, admired the Czech cultural offerings. Thus this textcould have appealed to the Jewish and non-Jewish Czech reader on several levels:national pride, shared pleasure, and even, with his mention of Švenk’s daringcabaret, an element of resistance.


Feder’s description of the end of the war was anything but euphoric. Although,as he wrote, all the prisoners “sincerely celebrated the defeat of the high and mightyGermans,” many were preoccupied with thoughts of friends and family memberswho had been deported from the ghetto to “the East.”49 When some of these formerTerezín prisoners returned to the ghetto to seek their loved ones, “they brought usthe unbearably sad news: ‘In Auschwitz and Birkenau and other places the Germansgassed over four million Jews.…’”50 Although he did not mention his own losses, thisstatistic, for Feder, was not abstract. His own three children, their families, and mostof his congregation from Kolín perished after deportation to Auschwitz.

Feder, like Aurednícková, did not conclude his narrative with the liberation ofthe ghetto. In a passionate twenty-five-page text structured as a sermon—a rhetoricalform Feder knew well—he railed against the Germans, agonized over what the pris-oners could have done, mourned the senseless murders.51 In this text, whichunavoidably dwells on the topics of persecution and suffering, two impulses exist intension: the kind of caution Aurednícková exercised in placing herself within theCzech community of sufferers, versus a palpable urge to lament the depth of theinjustice against Feder’s own people. For example, he began three paragraphs in arow with variations on the phrase “Germans murdered Jews” before he first placesthem among other groups persecuted by the Nazis: “Hitler hated the Jews.…Hitleralso hated Czechs and all Slavs.”52 He presented his description of Jewish suffering,however, as a passionate warning to the Czechs to be on guard, for their own sake,against postwar antisemitism: “History teaches us that the enemy of the Jews is theenemy of all humanity. Whoever hated, persecuted, and killed Jews in the end alsohated, persecuted, and killed even his own brothers…. Hitler, great enemy of theJews, wiped out together with the Jews millions of Slavs and many Germans.…Therefore, never expect salvation from an enemy of the Jews!”53 Thus, by framingthe fight against antisemitism as a goal that non-Jewish Czechs should share, notonly to help their Jewish friends but to protect themselves, Feder presented not justJews and Czechs but all of humanity as a united front, standing together to resisttheir common enemy.

Feder, as a religious leader, drew not only on testimony about Czech culturebut also on his own specifically performative mode of communication, the sermon,to create an emotional narrative that could foster postwar bonds between Jewishand non-Jewish Czechs. Professor Emil Utitz worked within a very different type ofdiscourse. He presented his testimony on Terezín as an objective academic study,yet employed emotion in his text in ways that perhaps could have worked to dissolvepostwar boundaries between Jewish and non-Jewish Czechs.

Emil UtitzBorn into a German-speaking Prague Jewish family, Emil Utitz (1883–1956)received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the German University in Prague in 1906.


Most of his scholarly work was dedicated to theories of art and culture, aesthetics,and psychology. He taught in Germany at the universities in Rostock and Halle, butwas forced to leave his positions after Hitler came to power. He returned to Pragueand was named professor of philosophy, psychology, and aesthetics at the GermanUniversity. His prewar book-length works were written in German, but he publishedseveral articles in Czech in the 1930s.54 On July 30, 1942, he was deported with hiswife Ottilie to Terezín, where he became head of the ghetto library and superviseda branch of the lecture series. His book Psychologie života v terezínskémkoncentracním tábore (Psychology of Life in the Terezín Concentration Camp) waspublished in Czech in 1947 and in German in 1948.55

Like Aurednícková, Utitz was well known for his affiliation withGerman-language culture, but his memoir does not convey the same sense ofurgency to demonstrate his Czech identity. Rather, as a scholar intending to publishwhat he called a “scientifically interesting” work, his tone is objective and analytical.Like Feder, he portrayed the full range of national and political orientations repre-sented in the ghetto. Nevertheless, within the framework of his objectivity—andespecially in his descriptions of the cultural life—he managed to make his own emo-tional affiliations, as well as his opinions regarding the postwar situation of theCzechoslovak Jews, vividly clear. For example, in a short chapter titled “Images ofthe Future,” he argued that people’s hopes for life after the ghetto were intimatelyconnected with expectations that they would return to their past—that is, to a worldjust like the one they had left behind.56 He described performance as a meansthrough which the prisoners accessed the lost, fervently missed prewar world, andat the same time projected themselves into the postwar lives they envisioned. Henoted Austrian and Zionist Jews’ attachments to their own cultural forms, butrevealed his own personal affiliation with specifically Czech culture as well:

If the sentimental song “In the Prater [Park] the Trees Are Blooming Again” was sung,almost all the Viennese men cried, and even more, naturally, the Viennese women.Memory and hope [of returning] merged, painful memory and tiny, quivering hope.…The glorious concert performance of The Bartered Bride was, for the numerousCzechoslovaks, a joyful act of worship. When the sparkling melodies sounded, full oflife, the bright tears ran down their cheeks. Prague, so close yet so unreachably far,home, the firm tie of belonging. In taking it in, inhaling this strong, healthy, stirringmusic, the confidence of return; the vision of the Moldau with the old stone bridgeand rows of statues of the saints, and high above it the cathedral and castle. Thereshould wave, and will wave again, our own flag.57

Despite Utitz’s overall goal of objectivity, his description of The Bartered Bride as a“joyful act of worship” was striking. He began by speaking of the Czechoslovaks inthe third person, not immediately claiming the memories as his own. However, ashe continued to describe the powerful nostalgia for Prague, and even the vivid


visual imagery inspired by the strains of Smetana’s music, he ultimately placedhimself within the “we” of “we Czechoslovaks” with his phrase, “our own flag.”

In both Utitz’s and Aurednícková’s descriptions of performances in theghetto, the music resonated on a deep affective level where emotion was perceivedalmost as a physical sensation. As Aurednícková wrote, “our spirits quivered at thesound”; Utitz described “inhaling this strong, healthy, stirring” music. For both, itwas intensely evocative of “the homeland.” Such vivid descriptions may have reson-ated with non-Jewish Czech readers who experienced similarly visceral emotionalresponses to this music, and who also associated it with the “firm tie of belonging.”

Utitz’s discussions of the cultural life in Terezín pointed not only to his strongCzech national affiliation, but also to a politically inflected stance toward the role ofart in the ghetto. In the chapter titled “Work Morale,” he described theatrical per-formance not as a glamorous occupation but as a particularly challenging form oflabor that involved a certain degree of danger: “It was no pleasure for small groupsof artists to perform in the hospitals and housing for the elderly, in crowded, poorlyventilated, foul-smelling rooms, always risking the possibility of contagion.”58 In thisportrayal of art as a social service, as a good to be distributed to the needy, Utitzmade a complex contribution to the postwar debate regarding the role of culture:should artists engage politically with postwar reality, or should art remain a realm offree expression? Utitz combined the two in an original way: artists in the ghetto hadengaged with the reality of the elderly and sick people’s misery by providing themwith a desperately needed escape into nostalgia and fantasy. This escape for theaudience, however, did not mean unlimited freedom from social responsibility forthe artists. In a later chapter he described theater explicitly as a “service to thepublic” and warned against the danger of “l’art pour l’artismus” (art for art’s sake).59

Utitz in effect added a third option to the postwar debate: he portrayed Terezínartists as practicing theater in a socially conscious way by gauging their spectators’needs and acknowledging that engagement with reality was not in every audience’sbest interests.

Utitz devoted an entire short chapter to “Cultural Efforts,” distinguishing, forexample, between Czech- and Hebrew-language vs. German-language theatricalperformances in the ghetto: “The latter relied upon professional actors withingrained habits, which led to ham acting and bad provincial style.… Czech andHebrew theater was led by young directors who in addition worked with enthusias-tic amateurs. That was the right path, and in this way excellent things wereachieved.”60

Although criticism of the German-language “bourgeois” theater was alsocommon among the young, Czech-speaking, left-leaning Terezín prisoners, Utitz’sevaluation was qualitatively different.61 Although he had claimed in an earlierchapter that the Czech Jews were the leaders in the areas of music, theater, andcabaret, he did not attribute this to aesthetic or political superiority. Instead he


listed a host of factors that contributed to the more vigorous Czech cultural scene.For example he suggested that, due to lower levels of prewar emigration, a greaterproportion of talented artists remained among the Czech Jews and that, becausethey were still in their own country, they adjusted more quickly to the ghetto envi-ronment than the German and Austrian Jews. For them it was “the last remnant ofhome,” where they stood “in a common front with their compatriots against theinvaders and oppressors.”62 Thus he encouraged Czech readers’ pride and empha-sized Jewish solidarity with them, but without encouraging nationalist bigotry orappearing to engage in it himself.

Like Aurednícková, Utitz chose not to describe his own life after the war.However, in a two-page concluding chapter he engaged briefly but directly with thequestion of the postwar Jewish fate. Shortly after the liberation, the owner of thebuilding where he was living appeared in Terezín and struck up a conversation: “Hewas avidly interested to learn of our fate, because he was in no way an antisemite;during the war he had supported Jews to whatever extent he could. He asked aboutthe size of the losses and the number of those remaining. My answer did not suit him,and, very surprised, he wanted more information: ‘I considered the Germans a com-pletely thorough people; why have they not made a completely clean slate of it?’”63

Utitz concluded with a statement that revealed the strength of the Czech Jews’feelings of identification with their non-Jewish compatriots: he expressed the hopethat the “problems of such a laughably small minority” would soon be solved, since“wounds from enemies do not burn and cause pain as much as [injuries from those]with whom one fought, in times of need, as brothers on the same front.”64 After hismany appeals to shared pleasure and pride in Czech culture, this revelation of thepain caused by the Jews’ exclusion had the potential to encourage non-Jewish Czechsto reach across the boundaries that maintained Jews as outsiders in postwar society.

Aurednícková, Feder, and Utitz employed similar strategies as they attempted toreintegrate themselves as individuals, and to support the reintegration of the Jews asa group, into postwar Czechoslovakia. All three, to some degree, renounced or atleast underplayed their attachment to German-language culture in order to performtheir affiliation with specifically Czech culture. All three made gestures toward affili-ation with a left-leaning political stance. None of them attempted to argue for theprimacy of Jewish suffering, despite the sheer numbers of Jewish lives lost. Instead,they attempted to generate solidarity by presenting themselves as members of thelarger Czech community of sufferers.

Most emotionally vivid, however, were their descriptions of specifically Czechcultural performances in the ghetto. For this generation of survivors, the affectiveelement in their narratives—the performance of a choice, based on feelings of loveand loyalty, to affiliate themselves as performers and spectators with Czech culture—may have been the single most productive strategy available for generating solidarity.


That is, considering the diversity of their prewar linguistic and political positions,their ability to represent themselves as conforming completely with postwar expecta-tions regarding nationally Czech and politically leftist identity was limited. Instead, byfocusing on their enjoyment of Czech works of art, the older survivors portrayedthemselves as insiders to a powerful emotional experience that supposedly linked allmembers of the postwar community.

Would their efforts have succeeded in time? It is impossible to say, for muchlarger political developments soon began to dictate the survivors’ position inpostwar society. The Communists’ rise to power in February of 1948 was followedby a period of Stalinist terror and state-sponsored antisemitism. During the politicalpurges and show trials that followed, public discourse regarding the ghetto and itscultural life virtually disappeared from the public sphere. Survivors’ narratives didnot begin to re-emerge until the late 1950s.

Interestingly, there is a surfeit of positive emotion in the survivors’ immediatepostwar narratives that cannot be explained as attempts to generate feelings of solid-arity among non-Jewish Czechs. All three survivors mentioned pleasure even whenit was not rhetorically necessary; that is, in contexts where it was not directly linkedwith Czech culture. For example, Aurednícková wrote at one point about her lec-tures: “There were more and more listeners and the success made me happy.”65

Utitz described the cultural life as a whole in the ghetto as “an astonishingly cheer-ing picture.”66 Feder addressed the issue of pleasure even more directly. Followinga description of countless frustrations and the constant harassment of orders andcommands prisoners encountered during the course of a day, he wrote: “But aperson would be wrong if he claimed we were sad. We could not suppress thelonging for fun and laughter, and young Jews sang, played soccer, girls exercised onthe ramparts. Children raced each other and played at running and jumping andthey didn’t care that it made them hungrier.”67

As Václav Behounek recognized in his 1947 article on prison literature, one ofthe functions of testimony was its ability to confirm for prisoners that they hadreally experienced what they remembered experiencing: by reading the testimony ofothers, they were able to verify memories that their postwar listeners may havefound difficult to believe.68 The Terezín survivors, perhaps confronted by suspiciousreactions to a narrative that seemed not too monstrous but, in some ways, too posi-tive to be true, may have begun to question the role of the wide-ranging culturalactivities that they had regarded as a remarkable achievement and a source of pride.Perhaps these superfluous mentions of pleasure were intended, not for non-JewishCzechs, but for each other—for their fellow survivors, as a reminder that, ironically,one of the last places where they had been able to enjoy the full range of their cul-tural heritage, and where they had not been required to renounce aspects of theirpersonal linguistic, cultural, and political affiliations, was in the ghetto itself.


Lisa A. Peschel is a lecturer in theater, film, and television at the University of York. Beforetaking her position at York she was an Alan M. Stroock fellow in Judaica at the Center forJewish Studies at Harvard University. She is the recipient of a Fulbright grant (2004–2005)and of a Charles H. Revson Foundation fellowship at the United States Holocaust MemorialMuseum (2009). She has lectured widely in the U.S., Europe, and Israel, and publishedarticles on theater in the Terezín ghetto. She is editor of the annotated volume TheatricalTexts from the Terezín/Theresienstadt Ghetto (Czech/German-language edition 2008;English-language edition, Performing Captivity, Performing Escape: Cabarets and Plays fromthe Terezín/Theresienstadt Ghetto and Postwar Reintegration, forthcoming).

NotesA previous version of this article was published in Czech as “Touha po milované vlasti:Svedectví o ceské kulture v terezínském ghettu a o poválecné reintegraci” (“Longing and lovefor the beloved homeland”: Survivor Testimony on Czech Culture in the Terezín Ghetto andPostwar Reintegration) in the journal of the Institute for Czech Literature, Ceská literatura58, no. 4 (2010): 444–63.

1. The Terezín ghetto was located in an eighteenth-century fortress town sixty kilometersnorthwest of Prague. Terezín is perhaps best known for its active cultural life and its role as a“model ghetto,” to be displayed to organizations such as the International Red Cross in orderto counter evidence of Nazi atrocities.

2. Richard Feder, Židovská tragedie: Dejství poslední (Kolín: Lusk, 1947). All translationsfrom the Czech are my own.

3. In 1921 the Czechoslovak Statistical Bureau decided that nationality (národnost) was to beunderstood as ethnic belonging, with mother tongue as the main criterion. However, sincethe Bohemian and Moravian Jews, few of whom spoke Yiddish, had “lost their national lan-guage,” Jews were allowed to choose Jewish nationality regardless of language spoken. SeeTatjana Lichtenstein, “Making Jews at Home: Jewish Nationalism in the Bohemian Lands,1918–1939” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 2009), 80–81.

4. Feder, Židovská tragedie, 10.

5. Masaryk had earned the Jews’ gratitude at the turn of the century when, as a younglawyer, he protested against the prosecution of Leopold Hilsner, a Jewish vagrant, for thealleged ritual murder of a Christian girl in a Czech village. See Hillel J. Kieval, Languages ofCommunity: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2000), 167–68, 202.

6. The four parties were the Communist Party, the Social Democratic Party, the NationalSocialist Party, and the People’s Party. The Czech National Socialists (not associated with theGerman Nazi Party) were nationalist-oriented proponents of moderate, non-Marxist socialism.They were the primary intellectual opponents of the Communists. The People’s Party, origi-nally established as a Roman Catholic clerical party, also opposed the Communists. SeeBradley F. Abrams, The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise ofCommunism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 61, 68.


7. On postwar resistance to returning Jewish property see Helena Krejcová, “Ceský aslovenský antisemitismus, 1945–1948,” in Stránkami soudobých dejin: Sborník statí kpetašedesátinám historika Karla Kaplana, ed. K. Kaplan and K. Jech (Prague: Ústav prosoudobé dejiny AV CR, 1993), especially 159–61.

8. Tomáš Stanek, Nemecká menšina v ceských zemích, 1948–1989 (Prague: Institut pro stre-doevropskou kulturu a politiku, 1993), 21.

9. Pavel Eisner, “Heine a my,” Vestník židovské obce náboženské v Praze 8, no. 2 (1946): 11.Eisner (1889–1958) was known for his excellent translations of German-speaking Praguewriters, including Franz Kafka and Max Brod, into Czech. A convert to Christianity, Eisnerwas protected from deportation through his marriage to a non-Jewish woman.

10. Krejcová, “Ceský a slovenský antisemitismus,” 161.

11. For a descriptions of pogroms in and near the Slovak city of Topol’caný see ibid., 168.

12. Kurt Wehle, “The Jews in Bohemia and Moravia: 1945–1949,” in The Jews ofCzechoslovakia: Historical Studies and Surveys, vol. 3, ed. Avigdor Dagan, GertrudeHirschler, and Lewis Weiner (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1984),526f8.

13. For articles in the Jewish Religious Community’s newsletter regarding citizenship guide-lines and language courses, respectively, see “Pravní poradna: Státní obcanství,” Vestníkžidovské obce náboženské v Praze 8, no. 1 (1946): 7; and “Prehled o schuzích výboru a pred-stavenstva Rady,” Vestník židovské obce náboženské v Praze 7, no. 4 (1945): 29.

14. His letter was published in the Communist Party newspaper Rudé právo, June 12, 1945.As he wrote, “You call in Rudé právo for the cooperation of all…. I put myself at your dis-posal…. Today already an old gray-head, I would gladly speak a word now and then to thisbeautiful young life.” He was 56 years old.

15. Eisner, “Heine a my,” 11.

16. Vikki Bell, Performativity and Belonging (London: Sage Publications, 1999), 3.

17. Václav Behounek, “Naše vezenská literatura,” Kytice 2, no. 9 (1947): 385–96. Thememoirs by Aurednícková, Feder, and Utitz are three of only five book-length works aboutthe Terezín ghetto that he names. The two others were written by much younger Terezín sur-vivors: Ghetto našich dnu by Mirko Tuma (born 1921), and Terezínské torso by IrmaSemecká (b. 1916). Behounek did not mention one memoir that does bridge this age gap: Aprived’ zpet naše roztroušené by František R. Kraus (born 1903).

18. For an account of Czech theatrical activity in the concentration camps see Borivoj Srba,“Divadlo za mrížemi: Projevy ceské divadelní tvorivosti v pracovních, internacních akoncentracních táborech a veznicích nacistické Tretí ríše,” Divadelní Revue 1 (1995): 9–23.

19. See for example articles in the Communist newspaper Rudé právo about culture inSachsenhausen (“Sborník o 17. listopadu,” November 18, 1945; KK, “Ze sachsenhausenskýchluhu a háju,” November 24, 1945); and the untitled essay by František Miška relating Terezíntheater to postwar political debates on the role of Czech culture, in Nevyúctován zustáváživot: Sborník prací Gustava Schorsche a vzpomínek jeho prátel ed. Jan Kopecký, (Prague:Václav Petr, 1948), 135–38.


20. See, for example, “Divadelníci manifestují za divadelní zákon,” Rudé právo, October 28,1945; and Miroslav Kouril, “Stavíme divadla,” Rudé právo, November 1, 1945.

21. For an example of one such debate see the conflict between Communist andnon-Communist artists surrounding the establishment of the Cultural Community (Kulturníobec) described in Abrams, Struggle for the Soul of the Nation, 222–33 and 289–95; and inAlexej Kusák, Kultura a Politika v Ceskoslovensku, 1945–1956 (Prague: Torst, 1998), 222–25.

22. The former political prisoners’ narratives of suffering appeared frequently in their news-paper, Hlas osvobozených, especially in support of one of their main goals: the deportation ofCzechoslovakia’s ethnic Germans. See, for example, “Odsun Nemcu do všech dusledku,” Hlasosvobozených, April 12, 1946.

23. Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 10.

24. Ibid., 68.

25. For a description of Christian religious practices in the ghetto see for example JanaLeichsenring, “Die Katholische Gemeinde in Theresienstadt und die Berliner Katholiken,” inTheresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 2004, ed. Jaroslava Milotová, Michael Wögerbauer,and Anna Hájková, 178–222.

26. Anna Aurednícková, Tri léta v Terezíne (Prague: Alois Hynek, 1945).

27. Ibid., 7.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid., 33.

30. Ibid., 25.

31. Ibid. A preserved list of fifty of her lecture titles includes “A Review of CzechLiterature,” “Czech Poets,” and “Reading Czech Novels.” Elena Makarova, Sergei Makarov,and Victor Kuperman, eds., University over the Abyss: The Story behind 520 Lecturers and2,430 Lectures in KZ Theresienstadt 1942–1944, 2nd ed. (Jerusalem: Verba Publishers, 2004),432.

32. “From My Life” (Z mého života) is the name of Smetana’s String Quartet No. 1 in Eminor.

33. Aurednícková, Tri léta v Terezíne, 36.

34. Ibid. Capek’s works include the anti-fascist dramas The White Plague (Bílá nemoc, 1937)and The Mother (Matka, 1938).

35. Philipp Manes (1875–1944) was deported to the ghetto from Berlin in July 1942 andperished after his deportation from Terezín to Auschwitz on October 28, 1944.

36. Philipp Manes, Als ob’s ein Leben wär: Tatsachenbericht Theresienstadt 1942–1944, ed.Ben Barkow and Klaus Leist (Berlin: Ullstein, 2005), 346.


38. Ibid., 57.

39. Ibid., 98–107.


40. For a detailed description of the postwar parties’ attempts to claim Masaryk’s legacy seeAbrams, Struggle for the Soul of the Nation, 118–38.


42. Ibid., 115.

43. The name used to identify this event had important political overtones. TheCommunists, wishing to associate it with the Soviets’ Great October Revolution and thedefeat of capitalism, called it the “national revolution” or even the “May Revolution.” Theiropponents, arguing that it had not been a “revolution” but simply a military action to driveout the Nazis, fought Communist attempts to take ownership of the event by calling it “theuprising.” Aurednícková, interestingly, uses the name preferred by the Communists. SeeAbrams, Struggle for the Soul of the Nation, 146.

44. Feder, Židovská tragedie, 10. Of the three authors Feder mentions, Rakous died in 1935,Langer went into exile, and Polácek was deported to the ghetto; he perished after deportationto Auschwitz.

45. Feder, Židovská tragedie, 9–10.

46. Ibid., 33.

47. Ibid., 69.

48. Jan Karafiát, Broucci: Pro malé i veliké deti (Prague: Slavia, 1876).


50. Ibid., 100. Research has established more accurate figures regarding the number ofvictims of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps. See for example Franciszek Piper,Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz (Oswiecim: Verlag Staatliches Museum Auschwitz, 1993).

51. Several features of the text suggest a sermon form: in this section, unlike the precedingnarrative, Feder incorporated numerous biblical quotes and followed his descriptions ofevents with explications that often sought to extract a moral or metaphysical lesson.

52. Feder, Židovská tragedie, 100–101.

53. Ibid., 127.

54. His books include Der Künstler (1925), Geschichte der Ästhetik (1932), and Mensch undKultur (1933). His articles include titles such as “K podstate moderního ceského umení”(1936); “Totalita v umení” (1936); and “O lidském žití a umírání” (1937).

55. Emil Utitz, Psychologie života v terezínském koncentracním tábore (Prague: Delnickénakladatelství, 1947); and Psychologie des Lebens im Konzentrationslager Theresienstadt(Vienna: Verlag A. Sexl, 1948). The Delnické nakladatelství (Worker’s Press) was linked withthe Social Democratic Party.

56. Utitz, Psychologie života, 23–24. His claim is supported by the extant script of a Terezíncabaret set in a postwar Prague unaltered from its prewar form. See Dr. Felix Prokeš,Vítezslav “Pidla” Horpatzky, Pavel Weisskopf, and Pavel Stránský, “II. ceský kabaret,” inLisa Peschel, ed., Divadelní texty z terezínského ghetta 1941–1945 (Prague: Akropolis, 2008),212–77.


57. Utitz, Psychologie života, 23.

58. Ibid., 28.

59. Ibid., 55.

60. Ibid., 54.

61. See, for example, notes written in the ghetto by a young Czech-Jewish prisoner, JosefTaussig: “O terezínských kabaretech,” in Terezínské studie a dokumenty 2001, ed. MiroslavKárný, Jaroslova Milotová, and Eva Lorencová (Prague: Academia, 2001), 310–46.

62. Utitz, Psychologie života, 49, 48.

63. Ibid., 68.

64. Ibid.


66. Utitz, Psychologie života, 55.


68. Behounek, “Naše vezenská literatura,” 393.


“A Joyful Act of Worship”: Survivor Testimony on Czech Culture in the Terezín Ghetto and Postwar Reintegration in Czechoslovakia, 1945–48 (2012)

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