Autor/Autorin
Michael Gruenbaum was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1930. He grew up here and enjoyed a happy childhood with his sister Marietta. Until the National Socialists occupied his hometown, the persecution of Jews began here too and the family had to move to the ghetto. The loss of their beloved father, who was taken away by the Gestapo and murdered in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, was particularly poignant for the children. In the end, Mischa, as he was called, was also sent to a concentration camp himself and only just survived the years 1942 to 1945.
At an advanced age, Michael Gruenbaum decided to write down his story in the form of a children’s book. He wanted to tell what happened to him as a boy between the ages of nine and fifteen. After all, people always say about the Holocaust: „Never forget!“, he said, adding: „But before you can vow to remember something, you first have to know it.“
Michael Gruenbaum asked himself the burning questions. How can a child go on living if the father is taken away by the Gestapo one day and never comes home again? How does a young boy manage to survive two and a half years in the infamous Theresienstadt concentration camp with his mother and sister? The very camp that was housed in an old garrison fortress just an hour away from Prague and was a transit station to the Auschwitz extermination camp. How can a new life be started after these extremely painful experiences? What were the forces that kept him alive when so many people were dying at the same time?
After his retirement, Michael Gruenbaum not only wrote down his story, but also told the author Todd Hasak-Lowy about everything he could remember and what was inscribed in his memory, the pain and the enormous losses, but also the support and solidarity that helped him to survive. Following further research in Prague and Theresiendtadt, he turned the stories into the book We are the Eagles . A touching story that tells of new beginnings, while the reader constantly fears that it could already be over.
„The book is an amazing example,“ writes Michael Gruenbaum himself in the foreword, „of the courage, perseverance, ingenuity and resilience of a single person (my mother), of her strong will to stay alive and of the hope that better times would eventually come again.“ He does not mention his own abilities, which he developed as a child, and how he and ten children from Room 7 in the Theresienstadt camp managed to stay alive while eighty of them were murdered. But it is above all this child’s courage and perseverance that make this book so touching and captivating. You can’t stop reading because you are constantly hoping and suffering, suffering and hoping with Michael.
The time in Theresienstadt (Terezín) forms the main part (Part II) of the book at around 200 pages, while Part I tells the prehistory in Prague on one hundred pages. A fifteen-page epilogue deals with the return to Prague and the emigration.
The New York Times wrote about the book that it helps to make the unimaginable imaginable, while Publishers Weekly called it an inspiring testimony to human resilience. But the book is also a testimony to the strong empathy and courage of the writer Todd Hasak-Lowy, who dared to put himself in the position of the child Michael and to take up his struggle once again, as it were.
He wrote the entire text in the present, as if the story were just happening. The author witnesses it and asks the crucial questions: „Why is nobody prepared to help us or the other Jews here in the neighbourhood, even though we would help them if it were the other way round?“ „We are not allowed to buy apples … Who cares if we buy apples – what can it matter?“ „What have we done to deserve this? What have we done? What did I do that made those kids throw stones at me a few weeks ago and chase me down an alley?“
Logically, there are no answers to these questions, but they soon become so pressing that the protagonist of the story realises that it must be „better in Terezín, in the Theresienstadt camp, where so many „transports“ are now going, than here in miserable Prague, but who can know under these circumstances.“ (S. 71)
A short time later, Michael learns of his father’s death. Mind you, he does not learn the truth, only that „he … is“. Todd Hasak-Lowy describes this moment in the boy’s life with great empathy. „How is he …?“, Misha asks his mother. But he won’t get the terrible answer to this question until much later. At this moment, his mother protects him from the whole truth.
In November 1942, Margarete Gruenbaum and her two children, like so many others, were also on the transport list and had to „move“ to Theresienstadt. From then on, the word „transport“ became an increasingly important word in her life. It soon became associated with the uncertainty of where exactly the „transports“ from the Theresienstadt camp were going. And above all: what actually happens to the people in the place called Birkenau?
When Michael arrived at the Theresienstadt camp, he was initially separated from his mother and sister and placed in Dormitory 7 with forty children. „Welcome to the Nešarim,“ Franta (Francis Maier) says to him on arrival. „Nešarim,“ another boy explains to him, „means ‚eagles‘. We are the eagles. And Franta is our madrich (teacher or leader, I.W.).“ Thus begins the chapter „Terezín“.
Without their „teacher“ Franta, who himself was only twenty years old at the time, perhaps none of the boys in dormitory 7 would have survived the school building in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. This may be speculation, but Franta is a role model and father figure in one for the boys and what counts above all is that he teaches them under these extreme conditions: He teaches them to „survive as human beings“ under these extreme conditions of the camp through respect for others and for themselves. „When Misha returns to Prague,“ he says to them, „and Pavel to Ostrava and I to Brno, then we must return as human beings. As people who are still able to respect and love others.“ (S. 149)
What does that mean? Franta establishes a kind of code that the boys respect and that creates a community of equals. Under the conditions of the camp, this community means strength, just like the „Adler“ football team or the joint theatre rehearsals for the play Brundibar. It means mutual support, but also distraction and feeling one’s own body. Franta also teaches the boys that it doesn’t matter which team they play for. „The Nazis also work together,“ he says. „When you see tens of thousands of people with their arms outstretched and shouting ‚Heil Hitler‘ in perfect unison, that’s a pretty big bunch, isn’t it?“ „That’s why it’s not enough to work together. You also have to ask yourself: Am I part of the right bunch? Is this a bundle that I want to strengthen by joining it?“ (p. 163ff.) In other words, it is not just joining in or being part of it that counts, commonality is not everything, but the decisive question is: What do I want to fight for?
Basically, the whole book revolves around this question. Neither Michael nor his comrades are really aware of this at the time, but Franta’s role model quickly makes the boys from Room 7 realise that they can always make a decision at any time, no matter how difficult: Do I join in or not?
12 October 1944, a good two years after their arrival in Terezín, is the date on which Mischa, Marietta and their mother are themselves on the transport list from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz. Their hitherto privileged position apparently no longer applied. This is the hour of Mischa’s mother, who once again manages to ensure that she and her children are, as it says, „removed from the transport“.
Is it a coincidence or a miracle? Margarete Gruenbaum knew what she had to do, but she could not be sure that the train would leave without her, Mischa and Marietta (p. 283). The three of them owe their survival to the perseverance of this courageous woman and at the same time to the coincidence that the assembly hall, where those on the list were crammed in before being transported away, was already full. We don’t know what else happened that night, only that Margarete Gruenbaum „went back the next morning to sew more lovely teddy bears for the sons and daughters of the SS“.
And Mischa Gruenbaum? He will take all his experiences, the constant fear of death and the battles, but above all the love of his mother with him into life after the camp.
After the liberation of the Theresienstadt camp from Soviet soldiers in 1945, better times came for the three Gruenbaum survivors, but they still couldn’t feel safe. With his mother and sister, Michael Gruenbaum emigrated to the United States soon after liberation for fear of the Communists taking power. They waited two years on the island of Cuba for an entry permit, then began the new chapter of their lives in the USA. Michael attended high school, then the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he became a civil engineer, urban planner and building contractor. In 2017, when his memoirs were first published in the USA, he looked back on a fulfilled and happy life in his hometown of Brookline (MA). He survived the incomprehensible.
Isn’t that exactly what Franta had given his nešarim as a commitment: „You will continue to remember, and as you do so, you will summon the courage to face the rest of your life. … Please promise me that you will never give up.“ Michael Gruenbaum kept these lines, which Franta wrote to him after the war, for the rest of his life. He knew that his „teacher“ was right, that life is always a struggle. After being liberated from the camp, he was full of energy: „There is so much to do, so much to see and suddenly I feel a strange, overwhelming obligation to live a kind of perfect life, full of heroic deeds that are so incredible that I can’t even begin to imagine what they might be.“
The extraordinary thing about the book by Michael Gruenbaum and Todd Hasak-Lowy is that it does not read like a story of the persecution of the Jews or the Holocaust. Instead, it tells a story of resistance and survival as if it were happening right now. As if we had to remember and behave in a certain way in our own lives right now. Not like Michael, his sister Marietta or his mother Margarete, but perhaps like Franta, the „teacher“ who gave the boys in Theresienstadt Room 7 love and support.
This attitude and openness gives the book great veracity. Likewise, nothing is added after the fact, not even what was immensely important to Michael Gruenbaum in retrospect, namely the brutal way in which the Nazis murdered his father in Terezín by having him torn apart by dogs. His mother protected him from this truth and the authors of the book act accordingly. For anticipating this truth in the story would have „changed Michael’s entire experience of his imprisonment in Terezín in a significant way“ (p. 338). How could he have survived the camp as a child with this knowledge? Would he have survived at all?
We don’t know, except that Michael Gruenbaum prefaced his book with the following motif: „Before you can vow to remember something, you must first know it.“