The Ghetto Fireman

The owner of these metal charms made in Theresienstadt ghetto was Pavel Thorsch, born in 1902 in Brno, Czechoslovakia.

Pavel was working for a bank in Vienna and was married to a Catholic woman. In 1938 they fled to Prague, where his work with the Jewish community offered him some initial protection from deportation, as did his Catholic wife. In February 1945, Pavel was deported to Theresienstadt (Terezin), leaving his wife behind. He became a member of the Fire Brigade (Feuerwache – FW), which was an indispensable part of the safety of the concentration camp.

There were frequent fires because the barracks and the bunks were made of wood. The Fire Brigade extinguished room fires, fires on the rubbish dump, and fires caused by electric cables. Fire fighters served as guards, labourers, rescue workers and first aid officers. Their tasks as diverse as managing floods to dealing with sewer blockages. The Feuerwache also burned vermin infested straw mattresses, assisted at the station with arriving and departing transports, as well as performing rescues and air defence duties such as black outs. It was dangerous, dirty and unrelenting work. The commandant of the Fire Brigade was an engineer, Leo Holzer who had been in the same high school as Pavel. He later wrote in his memoirs that towards the end of the war the Fire Brigade were forced to burn wagonloads of documents and hundreds of bags of letters and cards that hadn’t yet been delivered to the inmates.

Pavel met and fell in love with Annamarie (Mimi) Pollak in Terezin. After the Russians liberated the camp on 9 May 1945, they left together. They eventually divorced their respective spouses and married in 1947. In December 1948 they arrived in Australia with their daughter.