THERESIENSTADT MARTYRS REMEMBRANCE ASSOCIATION
News Letter
14
ARTICLES
M
y grandmother Minna (Wilhelmina) Pächter lived until
1938 with my parents in the Czech city of Bodenbach
(today Podmokly, part of the city of Děčín) near the German
border. At the end of year 1939 my parents and I succeeded
in entering the land of Israel, but Minna herself, at age 67,
remained behind and like the majority of Czech Jews was sent
to Theresienstadt. As result of the systematic starvation there,
she passed away on 27 September 1944, on Yom Kippur.
We know about her life there mainly thanks to a relative,
Elisabeth (“Liesl”) Laufer, one of the survivors of Terezín and
Auschwitz. Mrs. Laufer was a nurse in the hospital of Terezín,
she transferred Minna there in the summer of 1943 and took
care of her with the limited means she could muster. After
the end of the war she reached the land of Israel, remarried
(her first husband vanished in Auschwitz) and raised her
family in Haifa.
But there is more: after the war written material from Minna
also arrived, especially a collection of cooking recipes
(”Kochbuch”) hand-written in a notebook, assembled by her
and 13 partners in a barracks room in Terezín. These were
recipes kept in memory from better times, before Hitler, and
that notebook (with additional material on slips of paper) is
nowadays preserved at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington. These writings served as the foundation of two
books—“In Memory’s Kitchen “ (English, 1996) edited by Cara
de Silva, and in French “Les Carnets de Minna”, written and
illustrated by Anne Georget and Elsie Herberstein, who also
created around it a documentary video of 42 minutes.
Minna also composed humorous rhymes about her room-
partners, and these too have been translated to English. Today
we do not know enough about the origins of all of this material.
The notebook in which most of it is written carries the name
of Valery (“Vally”) Grabscheid, a room-mate of Minna and a
holocaust survivor. The notebook and the papers reached in
1961 the hands of Minna’s daughter, Anna Stern in New York.
Vally’s daughter, Zhenka Manuel, knew Minna in the camp and
also survived. She celebrated her wedding in Terezin in March
of 1943, and Minna then composed for her wedding-rhymes,
which reached me in 1996 and were translated. In Israel
Zhenka’s son collected memories, letters and photographs of
his mother and her family, and published them in a Hebrew
book “Love and War, Zhenka’s story 1921-2003.” His wife
Pauline published a book of recipes of her own, “Flavors and
Aromas from the kitchen of Zhenka and her mother.”
After all this it would be hard to imagine the revelation of new
material from Minna Pächter, but that’s exactly what happened.
On the 19
th
of October 2015 the following e-mail arrived:
My name is Dr. Susan Roubiček and I believe I have something
that may be of interest to you and your family. My family
originates from the Czech Republic and my father and his
A second collection of recipes by Minna Pächter /
David Stern
family at some point were all in Theresienstadt. Please contact.
Naturally I contacted her immediately, and so learned that
Dr. Roubiček is a Jewish dentist and that she held a second
collection of Minna’s recipes. On November 27 we met her,
together with my wife and our son Allon, and received at that
time the collection of recipes, hand-written by my grandmother
in a notebook of square-ruled paper. Dr. Roubiček turned out
to be a sympathetic and lively woman, married with a 12-year-
old daughter who is very much interested in soccer.
How did the notebook reach Dr. Roubiček? Through Anna
Ermes, one of the survivors of the Terezín “ghetto” who
had lived before the war in Vienna, capital of Austria, and
afterwards too. Mrs. Ermes was the aunt of Susan’s father,
who received the notebook from her after she passed away
in 1967. A year ago Susan’s mother also passed away and
the notebook passed into the hands of Dr. Roubiček’s, who
realized that here was an important treasure for members of
Minna’s family. But how could she find that family? She turned
to the Jewish Museum of New York, and there they knew
about the previous collection of recipes and directed her to
me. By the way, two more grandsons and a grand-daughter
of Minna live in Israel today— Gabi Ben-Aris in Sderoth, Itamar
Ben-Aris in Kibbutz Erez and Chamutal Karny in Beit Yitzchak.
The notebook is intended to join the previous collection of
recipes at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
The manuscript is much clearer and cleaner than the older
collection, in which one can recognize the handwritings of
different women who wrote down what they remembered.
Here it is clear that everything was written by a single woman,
and the front page (see image) declares:
Cooking Recipes
Kochrezepte
Tested and written down
Erprobt und Geschrieben
By your room-mate of L.403
von Ihrer Mitwohnerin aus L.403
in Theresienstadt
in Theresienstadt
Remember
gedenken Sie ihrer
Yours in Friendship
in Freundschaft
Minna Pächter
Minna Pächter
Born Stein [in] Frauenberg
geb Stein —Frauenberg
From Bodenbach on the Elbe
aus Bodenbach a/E
July 1943
Juli 1943
The notebook contains only recipes, and additional recipes
are attached to it, in a notebook improvised from pages of
thick paper. In contrast with the earlier cookbook, most of the
recipes here describe sweet dishes and desserts: apparently
Minna selected food meant to bring comfort. I am currently
starting to write up the life story of Minna and her family, about
which an appreciable amount of material has accumulated.
Of course the question arises here—how did it happen that an
additional collection of recipes existed? That can be explained
thanks to the date of that front page, July 1943.