Before
starting in on part 2 of my biography of my great-grampa, Dr. Siegfried
Peltesohn, I encourage anyone who hasn't already done so the read
my entry on Theresienstadt.
The history is very important for understanding a number of the events
that take place in the following narrative.
From its very beginning, Theresienstadt received a total
649 rail transports of Jews, mostly from large cities such as Berlin, Prague, and Vienna.
In looking through the list of deportations, my heart absolutely broke
when I read about the Kindertransport that occured after the
liquidation of Bialystok Ghetto; the 1,196 children and 53 adult
caretakers passed through Theresienstadt on their way to their murder
at Auschwitz. While I am... utterly horrified by the fact that there is
a website called ExecutedToday.com, the
description they have of this event is the most thorough I've found. And it's awful. Absolutely,
completely, and in every way a horrifying example of the depravity that
it terrifies me to know that humans are capable of.
But I digress.
Before they were deported my GGM sent weekly letters to her
daughter, my gramma, in New York, reporting on the deteriorating
situation in Berlin and their attempts to secure passage to the United
States. Unfortunately, this never happened. Due to his being a
decorated WWI veteran, my GGP, along with my GGM,
was deported on
Transport I/90 that left Berlin on 18 March, 1943, and arrived at Theresienstadt
(located in what is now the Czech Republic) the next day. The
information I've found indicates that they were listed as prisoners
11968 and
11969,
respectively; I'd originally thought that these numbers might have been
tattooed on their arms, but the
tattooing system was only used to
identify forced laborers at Auschwitz and so my
GGM and GGP were spared at least this inhumanity.
(For anyone unfamiliar with the process, the original tattoos were done
by slamming a metal stamp into the prisoner's flesh and then rubbing
ink into the bleeding wound. I cringe to think of the agony. Later on
they switched to using a single needle tattoo machine that was probably
not unlike this
1940 American model.
I'm tattooed (
1,
2,
3), and... They hurt. A lot. Sure,
some areas are not as bad as others, but they're still painful for
someone in their 20's/30's, and the idea of one being crudely inflicted
on someone in his mid-60's is... I'm glad they didn't have to endure
that on top of everything else.)
