Surviving the Holocaust: 'There is no God'

"I realized there was no God when I was six,” says Elisabeth Scheiderbauer. The year was 1943; sick with pneumonia, she was lying in the luggage net of a train that was taking her along with her older sister Helga and her mother from their hometown of Vienna to the Theresienstadt Ghetto in what was then Czechoslovakia. The three of them shared the fate of countless Jews before and after them.

Elisabeth remembers her Protestant grandfather seeing them off at the train station with flowers — an "absurd idea," but she recognizes that he thought it was the right thing to do. A piece of normality in their life that had not existed for a long time.

No saving Austria

Under pressure from the Nazis, who threatened to invade the neighboring country by force, Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg announced his resignation on March 11, 1938, and the "Anschluss” to Hitler's Germany was complete. Schuschnigg ended his speech with the words: "May God save Austria."

Helga Feldner-Buszin, Elisabeth Scheiderbauer's sister, says their father, a well-respected doctor, did not properly recognize the threat at that time. When he was deported to Buchenwald as a forced laborer, the family's world fell apart. Helga recalls that the once well-built man returned in 1939 "shorn, shaky, rickety, anxious." He had to leave the country within two days. His wife booked him passage on a ship from Genoa to Cuba, but at the Italian port it became clear the ticket was fake and there was no ship.

Their father was imprisoned and later deported by the SS to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

Clause for 'Jewish half-breeds'

Mother and daughters were initially spared deportation. Helga and Elisabeth were the results of a so-called "mixed marriage": their father was Jewish, their mother a Protestant who had converted to Judaism in 1931. As "half Jews," the sisters had more rights under the Nazi race laws than "full-blooded Jews." But their daily reality did not reflect that. Helga was expelled from school and forced to wear a yellow star. The sisters were repeatedly picked up by authorities, and their mother and grandfather were repeatedly able to save them from deportation, "because of this special clause for 'Jewish half-breeds.'"

But in 1943, their luck ran out. When Helga reached the age of 14, the final deportation order arrived. Her mother went along voluntarily, taking six-year-old Elisabeth with her. "My mother," says Helga, "was a strong woman. She didn't think she ought to be better off than her husband or her children."

The horror of the 'model ghetto'

Theresienstadt lay north of Prague in what was then German-occupied Czechoslovakia. The Nazis set up a collection camp in the former garrison town. The camp was presented to foreign visitors, including those from the International Red Cross, as a model ghetto under Jewish self-administration — with stores, a coffee house and even a children's playground. "I remember once having to play on the swings all day,” Elisabeth recalls. "When the visitors left, the swings disappeared too."

Helga confirms that this this ideal world was a Nazi propaganda lie: "Look, Adolf Hitler is giving the Jews a city where they can have a say in things and a good life."

The reality was different. Helga, Elisabeth and her mother slept on sacks of straw and were bitten by fleas and lice. There was hardly anything to eat. "I cried from hunger," says Elisabeth. The days passed with forced labor, humiliation and disenfranchisement. Around 140,000 men, women and children ended up in the Theresienstadt ghetto, most of whom were eventually sent on to Auschwitz.

Three times, Helga's name was also on the transport list for a train heading east, and each time, she was fortunate to escape the journey. "She wasn't averse to going," says her younger sister, ”her friends were also going and she thought she could then work in Switzerland or somewhere else - where there was more to eat."

Helga stayed and survived, unlike some 35,000 inmates of Theresienstadt. One traumatic image from her childhood stayed with her for the rest of her life: she stood in long lines with other boys and girls by the river next to the camp and had to throw into the water those who had died of exhaustion, illness or abuse.

'In my dreams, Vienna was heaven'

The ordeal ended on May 8, 1945, when the Red Army liberated the camp. The small family had miraculously survived. They wanted to return home as quickly as possible. "My mother had raved to me about how beautiful Vienna was. In my dreams, Vienna was heaven, but when we got there, everything had been bombed,” Elisabeth recalls.

Her mother had also spoken often of their father, portraying him as a radiant hero. She never expected him to survive Auschwitz. But he came back, broken and traumatized: "He had nightmares, screamed loudly at night, shouted his tattooed number." He never spoke about his experiences in the camp, only saying: "I didn't kill myself because I hoped I would see you again."

'Hatred is something completely incomprehensible to me'

The Nazi regime was history, but antisemitism was not. "My parents always said, 'Don't tell anyone you're Jewish,'" says Elisabeth. Years after the end of the war, she experienced the "Horst-Wessel-Lied," the anthem of the Nazi Party, being sung at a ballet rehearsal in Salzburg at Christmas. Another time, a stranger approached her and pointed at a little dark-skinned girl, with the words: "That one should be sent to the fire."

"Hatred is something completely incomprehensible to me," says Elisabeth.

She became a dancer, as dancing was Elisabeth's answer to the horror she experienced: "When I was afraid, I danced." Her older sister became a doctor, and died on October 19, 2024 at the age of 95.

An appeal against forgetting

Austrian film director Robert Hofferer has brought the memories of Helga and Elisabeth to the screen. "The message is that the memory of the victims of the Shoah and all the victims of that time of darkness need to be carried on and on and on," he says. "This memory has no expiration date. The contemporary witnesses who are still alive have a right to be heard and seen."

His film, Verity Circle, is a documentary made up of stories by the sisters Helga and Elisabeth combined with sequences that translate the suffering they endured into contemporary art — as poetry, dance, painting or song. The film is aimed specifically at "a young audience that often knows too little about the inhuman and destructive terror of the Nazis and the Shoah,” says Hofferer. It is a suggestion to "take a stand against the dangerous slogans of our time, namely the exclusion and persecution of so-called ‘others,' whether because of skin color, religion, origin or sexual orientation.”

The documentary Verity Circle is in cinemas in Germany on November 7, 2024. No information on a wider release was available at the time of publication.

This article was originally published in German.