Helga Pollak-Kinsky

Helga Pollak-Kinsky (born May 28, 1930 in Vienna ) is an Austrian who survived the Holocaust .

Life

Helga Pollak grew up in Vienna as the daughter of the owner of the Palmhof concert café at Mariahilfer Strasse 135. Her father Otto Pollak (1894–1978) was a soldier in the First World War and disabled. Helga Pollak was seven years old when, after the so-called Anschluss of Austria, the Jews were also persecuted in Vienna. Therefore, in the summer of 1938 she was housed with relatives in Kyjov in Czechoslovakia , where she attended the Czech school and first had to learn Czech .

Girls' dormitory L 410 (to the right of the church) (current photo from Theresienstadt from 2014)

Her parents had since separated and her mother, Frieda Pollak, had emigrated to Great Britain. After the defeat of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Helga Pollak was supposed to be brought to safety in a children's transport from Hechaluz to England, but this did not succeed. Attending public schools was forbidden to the Jews and Pollak attended the Jewish school in Brno until 1941 . In January 1943, she and her father were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto . There she was sent to the girls' home L 410 in the ghetto. In her diary , Pollak describes with the eyes and language of a teenager the life of the girls in room 28, the secret school lessons, peripheral only their participation in the performance of the children's opera Brundibár , the choir lessons under Rafael Schächter and the "beautification actions" on the occasion of the tour of the International Red Cross . She was among the extras when Kurt Gerron was forced to make the film Theresienstadt . Of the fifty to sixty girls who had stayed in Room 28 over the months before they were deported, only fifteen survived.

On October 23, 1944, Pollak was also transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp and from there, as a concentration camp prisoner, was transferred to a subcamp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp in Oederan for forced labor to manufacture ammunition for Deutsche Kühl- und Kraftmaschinen GmbH (subsidiary of DKW ) . In April 1945 she was transported back to the Theresienstadt concentration camp on a prisoner transport, where she was liberated with her father. It was first of all because of the typhus risk in quarantine taken. 63 of her family in Kyjov had been murdered in concentration camps.

In 1946 Pollak moved to her mother's home in London and attended college there. In 1951 she married a Jewish German who had escaped to Bangkok during the Nazi era . They had two children, lived in Bangkok and Addis Ababa, and returned to Vienna in 1957. Pollak-Kinsky is an active member of the International Alliance of Women .

The American documentary filmmaker and Theresienstadt survivor Zuzana Justman made two films with her: Terezín Diary (1989) and Voices of the Children (1997), which received an Emmy Award in 1999 . Pollak-Kinsky has been organizing several meetings of the residents of room 28 at the time since 1991. Hannelore Brenner-Wonschick documented the group and has organized scenic readings from Kinsky’s diary since 2002. In Brenner's book Die Mädchen von Zimmer 28 (2004) the diary served as a red thread, the diary itself was published in 2014 by Brenner with comments.

Helga Pollak-Kinsky received the Federal Cross of Merit on Ribbon of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2013 . In January 2014 she was invited by the United Nations to speak at the Holocaust memorial ceremony in Geneva . In January 2015, she was one of 19 survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp , whose story was included in the comprehensive cover report The Last Witnesses in the German news magazine Der Spiegel . In April 2016 she was awarded the Golden Medal of Merit of the State of Vienna .

Quote

“In the transport with which I was brought to Auschwitz on October 23, 1944, there were 1715 people, 211 survived. Most of us were gassed as soon as we arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau. I was lucky, I survived. It was just a coincidence. [...] I can speak objectively about what I have experienced. But when I am reminded of certain moments or when I listen to certain music, everything comes up again. That we were treated like cattle, this state-organized mass murder - I'll never understand that. We are human like everyone else. "

- Helga Pollak-Kinsky : The last witnesses

Fonts

• My Theresienstadt diary 1943–1944 and the notes of my father Otto Pollak. Completed with historical facts and conversations with Helga Kinsky and edited by Hannelore Brenner. Edition Room 28, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-00-043804-2 .

literature

• Hannelore Brenner-Wonschick : The girls from room 28. Friendship, hope and survival in Theresienstadt. Droemer, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-426-27331-4 .
• Andree Michaelis: Narrative Rooms after Auschwitz. Literary and videotaped testimonies from survivors of the Shoah. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-05-005955-6 (also dissertation at FU Berlin 2011).

Web links

• Literature by and about Helga Pollak-Kinsky in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Helga Pollak-Kinsky in the bibliographic database WorldCat
• Helga Pollak , on the privately organized website Ghetto Theresienstadt

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hannelore Brenner-Wonschick: Die Mädchen von Zimmer 28. 2004, p. 33 ff.
2. ↑ Hannelore Brenner-Wonschick: Die Mädchen von Zimmer 28. 2004, p. 22.
3. ↑ Hannelore Brenner-Wonschick: Die Mädchen von Zimmer 28. 2004, p. 368.
4. ↑ Hannelore Brenner-Wonschick: Die Mädchen von Zimmer 28. 2004, p. 369.
5. ↑ Terezín Diary (1990) in the Internet Movie Database (English)
6. ↑ Vincent Canby: Review / Film; Remembering the Horrors of the Nazis 'Model Camp'. In: New York Times . August 16, 1991.
7. ↑ Voices of the Children (1998) in the Internet Movie Database (English)
8. ↑ Hannelore Brenner-Wonschick: Die Mädchen von Zimmer 28. 2004, p. 369.
9. ↑ Honor for Ms. Helga Kinsky ( Memento of the original from September 5, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , at the German Embassy in Vienna , October 16, 2013. 
10. ↑ ^{a b} Helga Pollak-Kinsky , at Edition Room 28
11. ↑ Auschwitz never left me. In: Der Spiegel . N. 5, January 24, 2015, pp. 50-69.
12. ↑ Mailath honors contemporary witnesses: “Respect and appreciation for passing on memories” . City hall correspondence of April 13, 2016, accessed on April 18, 2016.
13. ↑ We had to line up naked and walk past the SS. In: Der Spiegel . N. 5, January 24, 2015, 58 f.