In
the 1940’s HanuŠ Hachenburg, 1929 - 1943/44, and other
young boys, aged twelve to fifteen,
lived in Barracks L417 from 1942 to 1944, or Home One, which the boys referred to as the Republic of Shkid.
The Jewish boys secretly produced a weekly magazine called Vedem (In the Lead) at the model concentration camp, Terezin.
The young poet Hanuš Hachenburg The Republic of Skhid For children Life and death Remembrance Reflection meetings
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Athem of The Republic of Škid Oh, what glory; all are cheering The whole of One is on its feet Government has come to being Of the Republic of Škid Every man is our brother Christian or Jewish kid United we march under the banner Of the Republic of Škid Insult us no one shall dare No one shall dare to hit To work hard we swear To honor the Republic of Škid.
Van Westerbork naar Theresiënstadt Theresiënstadt
L417 - Former school which was used as barracks for boys 10 - 15 years old.
In Tereziń Hanuš wrote a puppet play, ‘We are Looking for a Monster’, but it was never performed.
Over Valtr Eisinger en In the lead (Vedem) - A Teacher's Guide
Terezin boy who dreamt of flying to Moon to escape horrors of Earth
Hans Krása's Brundibár, and the Surreal Cultural Life of Theresienstadt"
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Vedem
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HanuŠ
droeg samen met andere jongens uit Huis Nummer Eén
(L417) in Terezín bij aan de inhoud van de wekelijkse
ondergrondse magazine Vedem,
opgericht door Petr Ginz. De grote en bijzonder gewaardeerde
bijdrage van Hanuš Hachenburg voor Vedem bestond
meestal uit gedichten. De dichterlijke, gevoelige en
enigszins eenzelvige teener was ook buitengewoon goed
belezen en geïnformeerd.
Valtr Eisinger: I do not want to give you ready answers. That would be too easy. Nor do I wish to say straight out: let us love these and hate those. I shall try to outline a method that is less easy, one that will force you to think and draw your own conclusions.(..) Let me quote some of Goethe's sayings, that they might become the basis for our thoughts and our conclusions! (..) "National hatred is altogether a strange thing. It is at its most powerful and most vehement on the lowest levels of culture. But there is a level where it completely disappears and where to some extent we stand above nations, and feel the fortunes or misfortunes of neighbouring nations as if they were our own. This cultural level is consistent with my nature." |
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List of the boys who perished: |
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Hanuš Hachenburg |
Petr Ginz |
Valtr Eisinger (oudere begeleider/leraar), |
Jirí Bauer |
Erich Zinn |
Emanuel Morgenstern |
? Lichtenstein |
Hanuš Kauders |
Hanuš Beamt |
Jirí Zappner |
Karel Liebstein |
Hanuš Beck |
Laci Willheim |
? Weisskopf |
Hanuš Kraus |
Zdenek Bienenfeld |
Benjamin ?, |
Emanuel Mühlstein |
Zdenek Weiner |
Bedrich Blum |
Beno Kaufmann |
Hanuš Pollak |
Zdenek Pollak |
Zdenek Weinberger |
Jirí Lebenhart |
Jirí Bruml |
Jirí Kosta |
Hanuš Weil |
František Feuerstein |
Bedrich Vielgut |
Robert Gelb |
Wiki Tauber |
Wiki Löwy |
Rudolf Haas |
Otto Sedlácek |
Adolf Immergut |
? Rosenberger |
Arnošt Kohn |
Hanuš Kahn |
Ota Pacovský |
Rudolf Laub |
Herbert Maier |
Kurt Fischer |
Jirí Vohryzek |
Zdenek Vohryzek |
Herbert Fischl |
Petr Fischl |
Jan Volk |
Zdenek Freund |
Ralph Popper |
Hanuš Kominík |
Jirí Taussig |
Jirí Frisch |
Herman Teichner |
Petr Gelber |
Egon Tenzer |
Kurt Glasner |
Kurt Segal |
Pavel Goldstein |
Otto Šindler |
Rudolf Gotlieb |
Harry Stern |
Karel Stern |
Jirí Grünbaum |
Walter Roth |
Hanuš Heller |
Norbert Picela |
Hanuš Kalich |
Leoš Marody |
Petr Lax |
? Grünwald |
Hanuš Sternschuss |
Jirí Herrmann |
Harry Pick |
Jirí Pick |
René Pick |
Bedrich Hoffmann |
Jirí Metzl |
Hanuš Kalich |
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The boys who survived:
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Juda Bacon |
Jan Boskovic |
Jiří Brady |
Toman Brod |
Adolf Bunzel |
Mendel Kopelovič |
Kurt Kotouč |
Pavel Kummermann |
Felix Kurschner |
Leopold Löwy |
Miroslav Neumann |
Zdenĕk Ornest |
Erik Pollak |
Zdenĕk Taussig |
Jaroslav Žatečka |
Republic of Shkid - The boys based their Republic on the eponymous book, written by two former street gangsters - Grigori Belykh and Leonid Panteleyev. St. Petersburg's streets in the 1920’s are full of gangs of homeless kids. From time to time some of them are caught and placed into a special school which is named after Dostoyevsky ('SHKola Imeni Dostoyevskogo' - hence the name SHKID). SHKID has gathered hungry, but impudent and sharp kids. The boys set up their own government during the Friday evening celebration on December 18, 1942. |
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What good to mankind is the beauty of science?
What good is the beauty of pretty girls?
What good is a world when there are no rights?
What good is the sun when there is no day?
What good is God? Is he only to punish?
Or to make life better for mankind?
Or are we beasts, vainly to suffer
And rot beneath the yoke of our feelings?
What good is life, when the living suffer?
Why is my world surrounded by walls?
Know son, this is here for a reason:
To make you fight and conquer all!
Ha - (Hanuš Hachenburg)
We
are all children, little ones,
Playing with a coloured ball.
We
cry easily with ruddy cheeks
And then, with glowing faces
We
look at silvery world,
At green hillsides,
At Life. We look
ahead
We are soft deer,
Complaining to crows
We
think that we live
But merely accept blows
We are all
children,
Playing with the globe,
Water sprites
Pursing
our lips
To receive our mother's milk,
peace,
life.
We
are all people,
That is, we are matter.
The millwheel of
time turns
Our feathers are drying, drying.
We scratch away
in the night
Over our blouses
That take away our eyes
And
in the day we are only in darkness.
We are all people
Gambling
for the globe,
And the globe turns in blood
And turns and
turns
And we reach out
For
the small lights in the night
We children, children
Of a
great revolution
We want to learn
So that from the earth we
might
Freely drink
Live
Triumph
Ha - (Hanuš Hachenburg)
My
Country
I
kiss my land and caress it,
Passing much time in its
presence.
This land is not on this earth
Yet it is within
us everywhere.
It is in the heavens, in the stars
above,
Wherever the bird nation lives.
I se it again in my
soul today,
And my heart is heavy with tears.
One
day I shall fly tot the heights above,
Free from my body's
encumbrance,
Free in expansiveness, free in distance,
And
free with me, my country.
Today it is small. A
handful of dreams
Encloses its distant horizons
And through
the heavy dreams
Shimmer the furies of war.
One
day I shall enter my country,
I shall rejoin my motherland
There
is my country! There is yours!
There is no "I" and no
misery.
Ha - (Hanuš Hachenburg)
Life
and death, that is the whole world,
A ray of sunlight,
A
fiery day,
A violent tempest on the endless sea,
Blood of
the living earth - eternal love.
When the trees are
in full leaf
When Monday always follow Sunday
When summer
breezes list
Through the heart's innumerable pages,
When
the sailor young and strong
Fights death in the ocean
deep…
Eternally red, life blood
Battles
against stone-cold walls,
Ever the world's people
Struggle
upwards
Learning to live.
The centre is dark.
This nothing - this circle -
This nothing is law, space,
God.
Next to the whiteness of the clouds,
The poison gas of
mocking laughter,
And next to Justice, brown earth,
And
then, then bright red love, a dream!
Everything is
colour: the grey river,
The green fishpond, its nymph,
The
yellow rock, the longing
Black circle, the imprisoning
universe,
The bright blue sky,
The black and red
execution.
Time passed: strangely it twists,
Like
a black thread in a constant spiral,
As time goes by, across the
ruins
They sing a song of life
Or again, when death
strangles them,
They sing the sad song of death.
From
the womb of earth life was born
To devour itself, to submit, to
fertilize,
Once a cell looked round
To live and die.
Life
conquered space
To live and become God.
That
was man. And man became the master
Over life and death, his
loins, his shoulders.
Time passes and time twists
constantly,
Strangely in a circle, in a spiral.
Today
death holds his filthy hand
Over the world and over my soul
But
the cup, fashioned of skulls,
With brains shrivelled and
dried,
Will overflow, and all
The bones, the blood, the
muscles call:
"Life! Life! Life!?"
Time
presses forward,
The spiral turns,
People are born and
die,
History happens, and seems to happen,
At the end of
the chain of time
Freed from fetters, from money,
At the
end of its wild spiral
Love twists into eternity.
Ha - (Hanuš Hachenburg)
Thoughts
I
stood at the corner and looked int het window
To a place where
heart is divided from heart
On the bed lay Had's limp
shadows,
When a madman suddenly lifted his hand,
crying:
"Mummy!…
Mummy,
come here, let's play together
And kiss and talk to each
other!"
Poor people, madmen, miserable figures,
Wrapped
against the weather, they went
Shivering with cold, and wanting
to shout
Before their days were done:
"Mummy,
hold me, I'm leaf about to fall,
Look how I wither, I feel so
cold!"
As the awful chorale echoed across the barracks,
I
- swept up in it - sing along with them.
Ha - (Hanuš Hachenburg)
Remembrance
In
that grey house, an old woman
Suffered on her bed. No one knew her.
And as she shrivelled away, with God her only succour
She secretly hugged something to her.
A kind of cardboard box, and when she dies
The ghetto will be her only heir.
And how she cried, that helpless woman.
She wanted to live to see her children one time more.
She did not want to die;
She wrung her hands (or clung to her faded souvenir)
Then in the night, dry for lack of water, died.
I was upset for fully half a day.
When they came for her things in the morning -
Such a beautiful balmy day -
All they found was four simple flowers
And a picture of her son clapsed
Tightly in her twisted, stiffened hands.
They took it from her, clumsily, roughly,
And tore it up.
I look at her.
I learned nothing more. But I believe -
I hope,
That mother and son were burned together.
Ha
- (Hanuš
Hachenburg)
The Heart
There’s probably a tiny room
Where a man cherishes his “I”
Like a ring on his little finger.
A terrible burden I cherish there,
So many feelings without a name
And
In every heart, in a nameless corner
I cannot express them.
I am an echo in the wind.
My child, when he is born,
Eager to live, will be a man
May he never live through
What I have seen and suffered.
I do not know what name to give
To my small room with its small door,
Perhaps a bird will whisper a message
In my ear like an echo.
Perhaps my child will say:
“Dad, I know how you are.”
My heart is so cruel to me
It will not let me dream,
But always says:
“My good man -
How would you put me in words?”
Today I said: the heart is a fire,
I have no strength to put it out.
Academy (Hanuš Hachenburg)
About this site:
Members of the Hanuš Hachenburg group in Holland will remember all deported people who died in concentration camps during World War II. Besides, we will commemorate the inhabitants of House One in Terezin and will memorize their Vedem activities while rebuilding a new European House. The group is independent of any other organisation. We will discuss local volunteer opportunities and resources for continued education on social issues and means for continued community involvement.
From:
Gary Friedman |