In late 1943, a 12-year-old Jewish girl named Evelina was deported from the Terezín ghetto to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She arrived with her parents, leaving her pregnant sister Lisa behind in Terezín. The family had spent a year and a half in the ghetto, where life still held some value. At Birkenau, that value was stripped away immediately.
The Terezín transports did not go through the standard selection process upon arrival. Instead, prisoners were separated by sex, forced to take cold showers, and given old civilian rags and worn shoes instead of striped uniforms. Each prisoner was then tattooed on the left arm. Evelina was no longer called by her name. She became number 71266.
Evelina and the other deportees were placed in the BIIb Family Camp, also known as the Terezín Family Camp or the Czech Family Camp. It was established in September 1943 for Jews from the Terezín ghetto. Around 18,000 Jews were placed there between 1943 and 1944. It was the only camp, aside from the Gypsy Family Camp, where men, women, and children stayed together, though they slept in separate barracks.
The camp was set up for propaganda purposes, but living conditions were the same as elsewhere. Hunger, beatings, hard labor, and limited access to water were constant. The camp consisted of 32 wooden barracks that had originally been horse stables. They had no windows, only narrow apertures under the roof. Each barrack housed 300 prisoners. A washroom barrack offered only cold, brownish water from a row of taps. The latrine was a concrete row with holes, divided by a strip of sackcloth that covered only the middle of the body, leaving faces and lower bodies exposed.
Evelina noticed that prisoners who had arrived three months earlier looked different. No one smiled. They had grayish, pale skin and spoke strangely. They told her that Auschwitz was an extermination camp and that the only way out was through the chimneys. Flames shot out at night, and gray ash filled the air like snow. At first, Evelina and others thought the chimneys belonged to a factory. They soon learned they belonged to the crematorium. Many refused to believe it, having considered the Germans to be cultured people.
Roll calls were held in the mornings and afternoons. When numbers did not tally, the counts could last for hours, which was especially tormenting in the cold. The only food was a bowl of soup at midday and a piece of bread with margarine or fake jam in the evening. The prisoners were so hungry they could think of nothing else. Despite this, they still had to work. Evelina’s father carried stones in road construction. Her mother worked in a workshop producing rifle belts.
The prisoners in BIIb could not leave their camp or interact with other prisoners. They could, however, see the ramp and the incoming transports of Jews who walked directly to the gas chambers after selection.
One privileged place in the Family Camp was the children’s block in Barrack 31. Children could stay there during the day until the afternoon roll call. The block was empty except for small stools. Children sat in a circle with an adult who was responsible for them. They played guessing games and sang, but they were also secretly taught. There were no toys or pencils. The only aids were 12 to 14 books smuggled in by prisoners who sorted the luggage of arriving transports.
The head of the children’s block was Freddy Hirsch, whom Evelina knew from Prague and Terezín. Hirsch convinced the camp commander to allow the block, claiming it would keep children busy while their parents performed forced labor. He obtained extra food for the children, arranged for the block to be heated, and had roll calls held indoors. There was also a choir that sang “Domin deos” in Latin. SS men came to listen and asked what the children were singing. Hirsch said they were singing “God bring us bread and peace.” One SS man replied that they already had that. Hirsch answered that this was why they were singing.
Hirsch was strict about hygiene, insisting that children wash daily even in the frigid winter of 1943 to 1944. He conducted regular inspections for lice. Due to his efforts, the mortality rate among children was nearly zero, compared to an overall mortality rate of about 25 percent in the Family Camp during the first six months.
In February 1944, Evelina’s sister Lisa gave birth in Terezín to a boy named Ladich. In a postcard sent to relatives in Auschwitz, Lisa wrote that Ladich brought them much joy. It was the last good news for the family.
In the administration barrack, a list was kept of prisoners. Next to each name was written “SB6.” The letters stood for “Sonderbehandlung,” or special treatment, an acronym for death in the gas chambers after six months.
On March 8, 1944, Freddy Hirsch, along with 3,800 other men, women, and children from the September transport, were loaded onto trucks and driven to the gas chambers. His death was a great loss for Evelina. Her father Emil died of tuberculosis one month later, on April 13, 1944. He was 47 years old.
On the children’s block, Evelina fell in love with a boy named Harry Krauss. At their last meeting before they left Birkenau, they kissed and agreed that if they were driven to the gas chamber, they would jump off the truck and try to escape. But the Nazis had different plans.
Evelina, Harry, and all other prisoners of the December transport were supposed to be murdered in June 1944. In May, however, new orders came from Germany. Men and women who could still work were to be sent to the German armaments industry. The doctor who performed the selection was Josef Mengele, known at Auschwitz as the Angel of Death.
Men aged 16 to 45 and women aged 16 to 40 were asked to report. They had to undress, stand at attention, and say three things: their tattoo number, age, and profession. Evelina was only 13, but she knew that if she were not selected for work, she would be murdered in the gas chamber. She reported for selection, giving her tattoo number 71266, her age as 16, and her profession as a gardener.
When Mengele saw Evelina and her friend Gera, he asked if they were twins or sisters. They replied they were only friends. He then said he had never seen such beautiful Jewesses. Evelina later said she did not care for the compliment.
Evelina’s mother, then 44, also lied about her age and passed the selection. The women were taken to the women’s camp at Auschwitz, where they were beaten by other female prisoners wearing green badges. Green triangles marked criminal prisoners, mostly Germans. In the women’s camp, ten inmates slept on one bunk. They were woken at 3 a.m. for roll call.
In the end, about 2,000 women and 1,000 men who passed the selection were put on a train and sent to other camps in Germany. Evelina arrived with her mother at Stutthof near Danzig, today’s Gdańsk, in cattle cars.
Those who did not pass the selection were not so fortunate. The remaining 7,000 inmates of the Family Camp, including mothers with babies, were murdered in the gas chambers in July 1944 when the camp was liquidated. Among them was Evelina’s grandmother, to whom she could not even say goodbye.
Evelina’s sister Lisa was not spared either. She arrived in Auschwitz in a train from Terezín on October 28, 1944. That day, Lisa and her eight-month-old son Ladich were murdered in the gas chambers. It was the last transport from Terezín to Auschwitz. Lisa’s husband Franta died on a death march a few months later.
In the summer of 1944, Evelina, her mother Ilza, and other women arrived in Stutthof. Their final destination became Guttau, one of 105 Stutthof subcamps established throughout northern and central German-occupied Poland. As they arrived, villagers held handkerchiefs to their noses because they had been told that the Jews stink.
At Guttau, 1,000 women received 100 tents. Ten women slept in one canvas tent on straw. The women were forced to dig trenches and anti-tank ditches against the Allied advance. Their food consisted of lukewarm water in place of coffee and a slice of bread. At noon, when they returned from work, they were issued soup cooked from unpeeled potatoes. During the summer, they could steal potatoes from the fields. During the winter, they starved severely.
The camp staff was extremely brutal. They tormented prisoners and meted out harsh punishments for trivial offenses. It is estimated that approximately 170 to 200 Jewish women died at Guttau. Among them was Evelina’s mother Ilza, who died of starvation and exhaustion on November 22, 1944. She was 45 years old.
Before her mother’s death, Evelina’s clogs were damaged and she could barely walk. Her friends Ana and Ana’s mother took care of her. At the end of November, a new order came. Those who were ill did not have to go to work. They would be taken back to Stutthof to be treated. But everyone knew it meant death in a gas chamber.
Evelina walked barefoot with her feet wrapped in straw. After a long and strenuous death march, they found that the railway station no longer existed. The Nazis sent the women back to the camp. Their fellow prisoners were surprised, having thought Evelina and the others would be gassed.
Evelina’s feet were painful and badly damaged. After a few days, another order came. Those who could walk were to go westward. The others were supposed to go to a nearby cemetery, where they would be picked up by lorries and driven west. But those in the second group were either shot on the way to the cemetery or hit on the head by Nazi guards. Many in that group, including Evelina’s friend Anuka and her mother, survived because the Nazis incorrectly assumed they were dead.
As the Nazis liquidated the camp, they injected prisoners with phenol, but none of them died. Evelina was left alone in a barrack and was not injected because they did not find her.
When Russian soldiers liberated Guttau at the end of January 1945, they found 163 women in a state of ultimate devastation. When the door opened and a Red Army soldier appeared saying “Zas,” meaning hello, the women knew they were liberated. Evelina was among them.
The women were taken to Soviet field hospitals, where Evelina recalled that the Soviet soldiers took good care of them. Later, on a train, Evelina met a Russian Jewish pediatrician named Dr. Meirov, who adopted her. He changed her name to Evelina Meirova. She was not allowed to speak about her past for many years.
She focused all her efforts on her studies and finally graduated in German studies in 1953. She married an architect named Simeon Nyar, also a Jew. The marriage produced two children, a daughter named Enina and a son named Victor. Since 1960, the family regularly visited Prague, where Evelina also met other female survivors from the Terezín ghetto.
In 1985, Simeon died at the age of 55. A few years later, Evelina retired. In 1995, she finally returned to Prague, her former home, something she had yearned for for many years. Her son Victor immigrated from the Soviet Union and presently lives in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He is a painter and sculptor. Her daughter Enina lives in St. Petersburg, Russia, and, like her father, is an architect.
Evelina’s life journey could fill an entire novel, but she wrote a modest biography titled “Belated Memories,” published in 2009. She was interviewed on several occasions in November and December 2023. During her last meeting, she expressed concerns about rising levels of anti-Semitism, intolerance, hatred, fascism, and neo-Nazism.
Until her last days, Evelina Meirova spoke about her experiences to make sure the world would never forget. When Evelina passed away on February 8, 2024, she was 93 years old. Eight decades since the Nazis killed six million Jews in the Holocaust, only a few survivors are still alive to bear witness. When survivors such as Evelina die, a living piece of history dies with them.
In the face of Holocaust denialism and rising nationalist sentiment across Europe, it is more important than ever to share and preserve the lessons from this dark chapter of history. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. There were many tears shed for Evelina Meirova.