Mordechaj Livni

“Various youth movements were active in Terezín as well. The way it began was that at the beginning of the German occupation, while we were still in Prague, the leaders of all Zionist Jewish organizations got together and they decided that they would cooperate during the war and that all activities of all the movements would be coordinated and take place at the same time. This is what was happening in Terezín as well. There was a so-called united youth movement, in which members of various movements, including the Boy Scout movement, were doing the same things. The activity of the youth movement in Terezín was limited to three areas: first, we were all learning Hebrew with the aim of going to Palestine once the war would be over. We all hoped in this and at least we made use of the time that we were there to already learn Hebrew. Second, there were some sports and games, to the extent that the circumstances allowed. This was divided by age groups, and sometimes there were other possibilities: there was even a sports day held on a bastion up there, where some contests, running race, jumping and so on, were organized. Then, and this is what I remember most, there was the main activity of the youth movement: there was an organization which was called Yad Tomechet in Hebrew, which means Helping Hand, but it was an organization without any organizational documents or offices. Yad Tomechet took it upon itself to visit people who needed help, to do something along the lines of the ‘Do a Good Deed Every Day’ slogan. They were mostly elderly and sick people, and we strove to do for them whatever was possible.”

“There is a specific case of a boy whose name was Rudi or Rudla Rosen, and he went with his parents to the east as the Germans told us. Several weeks after his departure a postcard came from him, written in German in capital letters and very legibly, as they were apparently ordered to write. The things he wrote were more or less general, he wrote: ‘Dear friends, I am here, with this and this man, we work hard but we hope that the situation will get better soon, and give my greetings to this or that person and to my girlfriend.’ He signed his name as Rudla Namut. Instead of his surname Rosen he wrote the Hebrew word Namut, in Roman alphabet, and if translated from Hebrew to Czech, Namut means ‘we will die.’ I remember the scene when there were fifteen or twenty of us boys and girls of the same age, sitting in some attic in Terezín which served as a kind of clubroom for us, and the postcard was being passed from hand to hand and each of us tried to make something out of it, because this was not the password on which we had agreed before. He wrote Namut there, ‘we will die,’ and what did he want to suggest by it? What did he want us to know?”

“I was promised that I would be with these children for about half a year and then I would go with a group of children to Palestine. Actually, throughout the whole time when I was in the Zionist youth movement, from my fourteenth year onwards, throughout the time of the Nazi regime and the concentration camps, this journey to Palestine and joining a kibbutz there or building a new kibbutz has become a kind of a dream for me. This was the light at the end of a tunnel: just to survive the war and survive the Nazis and finally get out of this violent Europe and build a new life in Palestine where my brother was already living, as I told you, and after the war it became apparent that he was actually my only relative, a close relative, who has remained alive in the whole world.”