The Girls of Room 28

Theresienstadt internment camp in Czechoslovakia served as a stopping point for tens of thousands of Jews on their way to the horrors of Auschwitz in the early 1940s. The children were housed in dormitory-style quarters, dozens to a room, and counseled by Jewish youth leaders who hoped that some would survive. Fifty years later, author Hannelore Brenner interviewed 10 women who, as children, lived together in Room 28 at Theresienstadt. Suzanne Toren narrates Brenner's poignant account with deference to the survivors' simultaneous angry grief and warm reminiscences. With melodic respect for the European names and descriptions of Jewish customs, Toren portrays the girls' astonishing exposure to world-class musicians alongside their meager meals and the omnipresent threat of another departure of friends on the mysterious trains. N.M.C. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

July 27, 2009
Brenner, a Berlin-based journalist, focuses on 10 former child survivors, women in their late 70s, who went through the Theresienstadt concentration camp during the Holocaust. She notes that 12,000 children entered the camp from 1942 to 1944, but only a few hundred survived to war's end, and a handful of women of Room 28 in the camp's Girls' Home, now scattered around the world, reunited for the first time in 1991. The insights of the survivors and stories of the camp's victims are unforgettable and full of poignant humanity, conveyed through letters, photos, diaries and remembrances. Forced into exile and almost certain death under the Nazi regime, the children confronted hunger, cold, terror and the soul's endurance as many of the girls of Room 28 were slowly eliminated; the small band of survivors is committed to keeping their memory alive. Well-detailed and inspiring, Brenner's book, especially her heartfelt epilogue, pays glowing tribute to these heroic survivors. B&w photos.