Louise Hermanová, born Louise Freund on May 8, 1916, came from a Jewish family in Svitavy. Louise’s father was a shopkeeper. When she was only two years old, her mother died of the Spanish flu. Louise and her brother Arnošt, who was five years older, were then in the care of a Jewish governess for several years, while a housekeeper looked after the household. Later on, their father remarried. His second wife was an Orthodox Jewess from Boskovice and Louise was unable to establish a cordial relationship with her stepmother.
As a schoolgirl in Svitavy Louise got to know Oskar Schindler, who had been courting her cousin for two years. In an interview with the USC Shoah Foundation, Louise described him as a young man who was memorable for his flamboyant behavior and enjoyed being in the spotlight. But she also remembered him as a man who, through his actions and business acumen, later contributed to the rescue of a large number of Jews in concentration camps at his factories, first in the suburbs of Cracow and then in the small town of Brněnec.
After graduating from the State Secondary School in Svitavy, Louise studied pedagogy for preschool children at the Montessori school in Prague’s Karmelitská Street. This school was not reopened after World War II. From 1938 on, Louise worked as a governess in Prague, first with a Czech family and later exclusively with Jewish families. She also went to exhibitions and even to the cinema after 8 p.m. with a non-Jewish friend from the Svitavy high school and dance classes who was studying art in Prague and who knew about her Jewish origin. Needless to add, after September 1941 Louise had to go+
out without a star on her clothes. She was a pretty redhead, which helped.
In April 1942, she received a summons to a transport to the Terezín Ghetto. The transport, designated Ao, departed from Prague. Her parents and brother Arnošt and his family had been deported to Terezín earlier. She did not meet her father in the ghetto because he had been sent on an Eastern transport before Louise’s arrival, although suffering from pneumonia and fever.
Louise’s brother who lived in the Sudeten Barracks was a member of the staff of the Ak (Aufbaukommando). As he was a dentist by profession, he had brought dental tools with him to the ghetto hidden in secret boxes in his suitcase. He treated fellow prisoners and even some of the gendarmes who guarded them.
Louise was assigned to work with the children placed in a small room in the Dresden Barracks. Later, she took care of preschool children in the home L 318 (today the building houses post office, among other institutions). She took the kids for walks, singing and drawing pictures with them, recounting fairy tales, dancing with them and doing rhythmic exercises. As Louise recalled, Vítězslav (Slávek) Lederer, who was in charge of the L 318 home, once showed her the full gendarme uniform, which he had hidden in a closet in his room. He told Louise that he was in the habit of visiting his fiancée in Pilsen. And he added that he could afford to do so thanks to good contacts with certain gendarmes serving at the barrier.
In December 1943, Louise was deported to the so-called Terezín family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she worked as an educator in a children’s block thanks to the good offices of Fredy Hirsch. One day, Vítězslav Lederer, who was the “blockältester” in the Auschwitz camp, came to visit her. She only realized later that he’d come to say goodbye before he escaped.
In July 1944, Louise was transported via Hamburg to the concentration camp in Christianstadt, where she was assigned to work in a munitions factory. In February 1945, she left the camp on a death march to the Flossenbürg camp and was liberated in the Bergen-Belsen camp. Louise’s father and brother and family did not survive the war.
After the war, Louise worked in the social department of the Prague Jewish Community and in camps for Jewish refugees from Poland in Náchod and Broumov. In 1947, she married Alexander Herman, a physician of Jewish origin. Their wedding ceremony took place in the Old-New Synagogue in Prague. The couple had two children, a daughter born in 1947 and a son (1949). The family moved from Broumov first to Most, then to Sokolov and finally settled in České Budějovice. Louise completed her education and worked for years as a certified nurse in the Department of Infectious Diseases in a hospital. She died on February 2, 2013.
The author of the article used excerpts from Louise Herman’s memoirs from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive to create content for the multimedia online educational platform IWITNESS ‒ Brněnec Concentration Camp.
Sylvie Holubová
Source: USC Shoah Foundation, interview with Louise Herman, No. 20527, 8.10.1996.
Jílek, Jan: And Where Was God… ? Barrister & Principal, Brno 2015, p. 104 (in Czech).
