Gerda Schild Haas (1922–2021) was raised in a religious Jewish family in Ansbach, Germany, where her father, Siegfried, was the kosher butcher. When Hitler came to power in 1933, the family began to experience antisemitic persecution. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, her family was forced out of their home and ordered to move to Munich. Gerda's father immigrated to the United States but was unable to arrange for the rest of his family to join him. Gerda moved to Berlin, where she worked as a nurse in a Jewish hospital. In November 1941, Gerda’s mother, Paula, and her sister, Elfriede, were deported to Kovno (Kaunas) in German-occupied Lithuania. There, the women were shot at the Ninth Fort, a killing site. In May 1943, Gerda was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto, where she became close friends with another young woman named Eva and worked as a nurse in a children’s home. In February 1945, Gerda and Eva joined a rescue transport to Switzerland. She reunited with her father in the United States in April 1946.
I saw Tosca, and I saw Carmen, and you must understand that I saw and heard this, it was the most magnificent voices there was. The Jewish—the top—the cream of the Jewish voices, had come to Theresienstadt. The best of Jewish musicians, of directors and conductors and everything. And we heard it. Of course, it wasn’t elaborate. It was in some attic room in the ghetto close. But the voices! I still can’t take a mediocre voice because in my youth I heard these magnificent sounds, and that stayed with me. And those people, after they were done singing, went behind the coulisses to the transports.
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