A Letter from Eliška/Líza Margoliusová addressed to Josefa and Vilém Kopřiva after the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen

2015

A Letter from Eliška/Líza Margoliusová addressed to Josefa and Vilém Kopřiva after the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen

  • 1st  July 1945

  • Acquired as a gift from the addressee's family in 1994

  • The letter is part of a personal estate stored in the Persecution Documents archival collection in the Shoah History Department.

AJMP, Persecution Documents, Acc. no. 78, Personal Estate of Eliška Margoliusová, Manuscript, Czech, 1. 7. 1945, Paper 135x208 mm, 1 page with envelope

Thirteen-year-old Eliška/Líza Margoliusová was deported from Prague on 17th December 1941 to the Theresienstadt Ghetto, together with her parents and her younger sister, Helena, on a deportation train designated with the letter N.  The family spent almost three years in the Ghetto.
On 15th May 1944, a total of 2 503 Theresienstadt prisoners, among them the Margolius family, went by transport Dz  to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The ‘special destination’s of this transport was the so called family camp, or Familienlager, whose previous prisoners met with a terrible fate — they perished in the  gas chambers. Along with several other girls, Líza was selected for forced labour in the German Reich. Their first task was to clear the piles of rubble left after the bombing of Hamburg.
 As the front line drew closer, the Germans would transport the prisoners to more distant camps. Líza was the only member of her family to survive. At the end of the war, she was liberated from Bergen-Belsen, one of the most dreadful camps of the war’s end.
On 1st July 1945, she wrote a letter from Bergen-Belsen to her family’s former housekeeper Josefa Kopřivová and her husband. In the letter, she tells them that she suffered from typhus in Bergen-Belsen and that she still does not know what happened to her parents and sister who had remained in Auschwitz.  She is still waiting to go home and is concerned about living in useless idleness.
After her return to Prague, Líza decided to leave Czechoslovakia and took a flight to the United States to join her father's sister there.  She married a Berlin Jew whose parents were also murdered in the Nazi camps.  She has had her Auschwitz number tattoo removed and her name changed to Elisabeth.  She named her daughter Helena after her sister.
 
Dear Pepi and Vilda!
I have written to you once already (privately, through a lady who was going to Prague), but since I didn't get an answer, I don't think you’ve received my letter. I hope you are all well.  I'm in the former concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen near Hanover. I returned from hospital three weeks ago. I had typhus. Now I'm completely well, and I'm waiting for departure to Prague. I cannot get out of here. There are no trains and cars arrive very rarely. These are private cars, sent from Prague for some people.
For a year now, I've had no idea about the whereabouts of my parents and Helena. I was sent to work in Hamburg.
My family remained in Auschwitz. I learned that some people (also mothers and children) had returned home from Auschwitz. I would like to ask you if it is possible to enquire about my parents and Helena at the relevant office.  If you find anything out, please let both me and them know.
I am quite impatient now and I'm looking forward to going to Prague. It is terrible that I should be stuck here for so long after the war. I am wasting time waiting and doing nothing.
Warm regards

Yours, Líza Margoliusová

P.S.  Regards to the Křemen family

Reverse side, AJMP, Persecution Documents, Acc. no. 78, Personal Estate of Eliška Margoliusová, Manuscript, Czech, 1. 7. 1945, Paper 135x208 mm, 1 page with envelope

Portrait of Lisa with her younger sister, Helena, photographed before deportation from Prague.