Margot Heuman was 14 when she and her family were deported to Theresienstadt, a Jewish “transit” ghetto in Czechoslovakia that was a way station — a cruel intermezzo — for those who would be sent to the death camps.
It was 1942, and the Heuman family had already been severed from the comfortable life they had been living in Lippstadt, Germany.
Yet Margot was happy there. The proscriptions that followed Kristallnacht curtailed Jewish life at home, but Theresienstadt had culture, school and community.
Margot saw her first opera there, “La Bohème,” and she fell in love, with a Viennese girl named Dita Neumann. When in 1944 her father was caught stealing food, he and the family were sent to Auschwitz.