Senta Jerabek was raised as a Protestant. Her mother was an Austrian Catholic “Aryan”, but Senta had a Jewish boyfriend. This boyfriend, whom she called 'Goldie', was sent to the ghetto and transit camp of Theresienstadt and Senta secretly visited him there nine times, taking him money and food. When Goldie was discovered in possession of the goods, he was immediately deported to Auschwitz. Senta received a cryptic postcard from him saying, “The journey into the blue has ended.”

Women in cattle cars enroute to death camps

At this point, Senta converted to Judaism and asked to be sent to Theresienstadt because she wanted to trace Goldie. The Jewish Council of Prague responded to this request by telling her she should go to a mental hospital instead! However, in 1943, Senta was indeed sent to Theresienstadt. When the Nazis opened Theresienstadt for inspection by the International Red Cross, Senta was stationed as a ‘waitress’ in ‘coffee shops’; all staged to give a fraudulent impression to the inspectors, of course. After the inspectors had finished at the first coffee shop, she dashed to the second one, where none of them apparently noticed that the staff were all the same. “We tried so hard to get near them to talk to them (and tell them the truth about Theresienstadt),” she says, “but we simply couldn’t.”

In September 1944 she volunteered to go to Auschwitz. She felt that as a volunteer inmate, she would have some type of protection and the status of an onlooker. She says that she never felt sorry for herself, as all that happened to her was of her own choosing. Upon arrival at Auschwitz Senta was chased out of the train by men wearing striped uniforms. “They were acting like lunatics,” she says. She was part of a selection carried out by the infamous Dr Mengele, the Nazi “Angel of Death”. After seeing a woman shot dead by a guard, Senta’s long blonde hair was cut off and she says this distressed her more than anything. She recalls the terrible and constant stench of Auschwitz; caused by decomposing and burning human corpses. She remembers standing for roll calls in the mist of early mornings while a band played music.

Later in 1944 Senta was sent to Freiberg, where she worked as slave labour on the assembly of German ammunition. She was there until April 1945 and saw the famous Allied bombing which burned the German city of Dresden. In the final weeks of the war she was put in an open cattle truck and shunted across Czechoslovakia to the camp of Mauthausen. Senta believes that the Nazis intended to gas her and her fellow prisoners there, but within 2-3 weeks, Mauthausen was liberated by American soldiers. By that time, some of Mauthausen’s inmates had been there for 11 years. She says that the Americans had to dig up a nearby football field to bury all the dead.

Senta survived the Holocaust and eventually settled in Australia. Her boyfriend Goldie, the reason she experienced all that she did, did not survive.

See her story in the Australian documentary film “Paradise Camp” (1986, Cinetel Productions)