Dagmar Lieblová, Jewish origin, was born in 1929 in Kutná Hora. In June 1942 she was deported with her family to Terezín and, later, the so-called Birkenau family camp. His grandmother died during the transfer. Her parents and sister were killed in a gas chamber in Birkenau. She was the only survivor in her family. They left her alive for “an administrative error in her record”. Hence the book that tells of his shuddering experience in the concentration camps and the postwar period is called I am here for a mistake.
The Huso publishes for the first time in Spanish the history of Dagmar Lieblová, collected by the historian Marek Lauermann, with translation of Kepa Uharte and prologue of Marifé Santiago Bolaños. Lauermann has spent years writing the memory of the Jews who suffered in concentration camps, especially in the area of Kutná Hora.
The book tells how Lieblová, who was then 15 years old, was registered as a young woman born in 1925 instead of 1929. She was included in the group of beans suitable for forced labor, limited to women between the ages of 16 and 40. Her sister was younger and her mother was 43 years old. They were murdered in a gas chamber. Lieblová saved the life by that simple error.
She was transferred to Hamburg. Then to Bergen-Belsen. He felt that his forces were failing him, that he could no more, until on April 5 the British army liberated the camp. Lieblová returned to Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1945, alone and sick with tuberculosis.
Dagmar Lieblová, together with other survivors, founded the Terezín Initiative, with which he organized lectures in schools around the Holocaust. In 2011, she received from the President of the Czech Republic the Order of Tomá Garrigue Masaryk and was also named citizen of honor of Kutná Hora.
These days he is in Spain to tell his story with his voice, with the serenity that gives the passage of time but with the sadness of someone unable to reconcile with a past so hard.
Marifé Santiago Bolaños writes: “Millions of human beings were destroyed during the infamous era of Hitler’s anti-Semitism. Those who did not die, those who did not perish, would bear the imprint of that ontological truth and tattooed cement Dagmar Lieblová, an error of whoever wrote the year of his birth, the savior of Auschwitz, and she is still in life. Commanded by her own non-will, who has been converted into a Jew and deported with her own. This non-will is the one that teachers, teachers, artists in the fields of extermination will fight against. Infantile transcended by the circumstance, Brundibár, as pollinating bumblebee of something that can not disappear in the abandonment nor in the errancia “.
Lieblová celebrates this Friday 88 years and will celebrate it at the Teatro Real in Madrid, where Hans Krása’s children’s opera Brundibár (1899-1944) is played, which was performed 55 times between 1943 and 1944 by the children of the concentration camp of Terezín, among them, by the own Lieblová.
Marek Lauermann. I’m here for a mistake. The story of Dagmar Lieblová. Huso, 2017. ISBN: 978-84-946245-9-9. 128 pages.