"THEY CALLED IT "FRIEND

The Children's Newspaper "Kamarad"
from GhettoTerezin 1943 - 1944

Curators: Yonat Klar and Alisa Shek

Design: David Gal

The exhibition - including its title - is based on the translation and research by Ruth Bondy in her book  "Kar'u Lo Haver"  (Hebrew for: "They Called it Friend"), published by Yad Vashem with participation of Beit Terezin
In the shadow of hunger, death and transports to the extermination camps a rich and manifold cultural life evolved in ghetto Theresienstadt. Many creations and documents survived and some of them are exhibited in successive exhibitions from the collections of the Beit Theresienstadt archives.

The subject of the new exhibition is the children's newspaper "Kamarad" (friend). Most of the children in the ghetto lived, separate from the adults, in crowded children's homes called "Heim"- on 3-tiered pallets. In a few of these homes local "newspapers" were published. "Kamarad" was the paper of 29 children aged 12 to 14, who lived in room A of the boy's "Heim" Q609.

The weekly (as the children called it) was an independent creation of the boys. There was no intervention, help and especially no censorship by the grown-up instructors. The newsletter sketches the children's world by lively and authentic lines, a world separated from the past and from the boys' families. They write about hunger, overcrowding, filth and diseases - in the ever-present shadow of death. The pages reflect the fear and uncertainty of the future, beside hope and youthful joy. All these are expressed sensitively with talent and humor.

The editor and illustrator of "Kamarad" Ivan Polak perished at the Kaufering labor camp, after surviving selections in Auschwitz. He died aged 15. Ivan Polak was a talented boy. In addition to the usual problems of every editor of a youth publication, he had to overcome the special hardships of the ghetto reality. In an essay written by him "How 'Kamarad' Was Born" he relates: "...to obtain the means for writing is one of the hard steps in the preparation of the paper. The most important is the paper... a fountain pen I borrowed from Shulina. It is cracked and the ink paints my fingers quite beautifully. An eraser I got from Kamcus, watercolors from Bejk and a brush from Jashkus... There are enough pencils because everybody finding a pencil stub brings it to me, declaring 'a present for Kamarad' ".
Ivan's mother bound the booklet with string. Each new issue was presented ceremoniously at the Friday evening Sabbath gathering.

One wall of the exhibition is dedicated to colorful comics on the adventures of 3 racing drivers - conceived and drawn by Ivan Polak.
There is also a beautifully illustrated and humorous serialized story. It deals with a family from the day of arrival in Terezin until the transport to Birkenau and is written by an outstandingly talented boy, who signed his pen name "Koshula". He is the only one among the boys who participated in the creation of the newspaper whose identity and real name is unknown. There are many and varied themes written about, some of them about life in the ghetto and in the "Heim": the communal life and its complications, relations with the instructors, coping with hunger, theft of food, fear of transports. Other subjects are based on imagination and the longing for the outside world: serialized stories on Indians and colonists in the Wild West, fantasies about the return home after the war...

In the rubric "The Boys of our Heim" the authors describe their friends and as boys will do, they often include sarcastic remarks and slurs. This is often our only source of information about the boys, enabling us to keep their memory. It is first-hand testimony about them being normal young people, like every boy or girl visiting the exhibition. Visitors to the exhibition will possibly identify certain aspects of the ghetto inmates' struggles in themselves.

The last article of the last issue of "Kamarad" (no. 22, dated September 22, 1944), titled "The Youngsters after 11 Years" describes an imaginary future meeting of two boys from the "Heim" in Prague, in autumn 1955. It ends with the naive promise: "...to be continued".

It was not continued. Four days later a series of mass transports to Birkenau commenced. All the creators of "Kamarad" were included. Only one of the instructors and four out of the 29 boys survived until the end of WWII.

The painstakingly laid out exhibition displays all of the 22 issues of the original newspaper. In addition to being a unique historical document, the exhibition is a memorial to the boys and their instructors, to young lives wasted, young lives full of talent and beauty.