Camilla Hirsch

Camilla Hirsch b. Wolf ( May 4, 1869 in Prague - June 29, 1948 in Lugano , in the Swiss canton of Ticino ) was one of the few elderly Holocaust survivors of the German Theresienstadt concentration camp. Her diary from Theresienstadt was published in 2017 .

life and work

Her parents were Josef Wolf and Julie geb. Pick. She had three siblings, older brother Siegfried (born December 19, 1867), sister Irma (born 1871, but died at the age of two) and the youngest sister Anna (born June 5, 1881).

Camilla Hirsch lived in Vienna for most of her life . She married Heinrich Frank (born September 9, 1857). The couple had a son, Robert-Alexander (born May 30, 1895 in Aszód ), who later became a traveling representative of a Swiss watch and music box company, and Margarethe b. Rusz got married. Camilla was unhappy in their marriage, got divorced and married Anton-Abraham Hirsch. It is not known when her husband died. According to research by the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien , she was the owner of a typing office in Vienna in the 1930s and worked as an amateur writer.

In 1942 Camilla Hirsch was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp , also known as the Theresienstadt camp or Theresienstadt ghetto . This was built by the German occupiers of Czechoslovakia in Terezín , in German Theresienstadt , formerly a fortress town of the Danube Monarchy, in November 1941. As a collection camp for prisoner transports to the Auschwitz camps, especially the Birkenau extermination camp , it was an important part of the Nazi concentration camp system. Prisoners who were deported there from the German Reich were deceived about their fate by home purchase contracts in a kind of old people's home. As early as May 1942, more than 28,000 Jews from Czechoslovakia had been deported there by the Gestapo and the Wehrmacht, and in September 1942 over 58,000 people were interned in a place that previously had 7,000 inhabitants. Of the more than 65,000 Jewish Viennese who were deported to the “East”, only a little over 2,000 survived.

Camilla Hirsch's Theresienstädter Diary begins on July 10, 1942 in Vienna, the day on which she was arrested by the National Socialists and taken to a collection point by truck. At the time she was 73 years old. Anita Tarsi: "The diary shows an active, self-determined woman who does not give in to despair and continues to fight despite the many difficulties that stand in her way." Her diary is one of the few documents that document the lives of older people Describe Theresienstadt. The text by Camilla Hirsch mainly revolves around three central themes, the constant hunger and the desperate attempts to organize food, the constant concern for the son and his wife who were in Hungary at the time, the consistent effort, despite malnutrition and more catastrophic hygienic conditions to stay as healthy as possible.

While friends and acquaintances were dying around her, Camilla Hirsch described how she defended herself against fleas and bedbugs and organized a series of food packages that ensured the survival of her and her friend Mila. Nevertheless, she was emaciated from 92 kilograms to 46. She did paperwork in the office and was for a time the deputy of a house elder, so she was able to avoid deportations "to the east" and certain murder. In February 1945 she finally took part in the railroad transport of the 1200 , which were ransomed by Jewish organizations at a price of 1000 dollars per capita and transferred to Switzerland. The diary ends on December 31, 1945, the day on which Camilla Hirsch finally learned of the survival of her son and his wife.

The planned move to Haifa , to her brother Siegfried and his wife Ida, was no longer possible for health reasons. It is not known whether she was able to see her son and daughter-in-law again.

Camilla Hirsch died in 1948 in the Italian Hospital (Ospedale Italiano) in Lugano-Viganello.

publication

• Diary from Theresienstadt . Ed .: Beit Theresienstadt . With a foreword by Ruth Elkabets and Miriam Prager and contributions by Margalit Shlain and Anita Tarsi. Mandelbaum Verlag , Vienna 2017, ISBN 978-3-85476-498-4 .

See also

• Ruth Elias (1922–2008) was initially sent to the same concentration camp as a prisoner at the age of 19. There are recordings of an interview with Claude Lanzmann of her .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Diary from Theresienstadt , p. 27.
2. ↑ There are also a few pages in the diary of the painter Elsbeth Argotinsky (1873–1952) and the memoirs of Hedwig Ems from Berlin, which were written immediately after the fall of the Nazi regime. Copies of both documents can be found in the archives of the Beit Theresienstadt Memorial , Israel.
3. ↑ NZZ report on February 8, 1945
4. ↑ Manfred Flügge : Rescue without a rescuer, or: A train from Theresienstadt . dtv, Munich, ISBN 342324416X .
5. ^ The ransomed Jews from Theresienstadt. (Report on the time in St. Gallen after February 7th. NZZ, Jörg Krummenacher, February 9th, 2015)