ROUBÍČKOVÁ, Eva Mändlová

Nationality: Czechoslovakian. Born: Eva Mändlová, Žatec, 16 July 1921. Family: Married Richard Roubicek in 1945 (died 1992); one daughter and one son. Career: Prisoner, Theresienstadt ghetto, 1941-45. Administrative assistant, KOOSPOL, Prague, 1957-75. Since 1980 private teacher of German.

Publication

Diary

We're Alive and Life Goes On: Theresienstadt Diary. 1998.

Eva Mändlová Roubíčková was born in 1921 in northern Bohemia (known as the Sudetenland; now the Czech Republic). She led a privileged life in the town of Žatec, where her father was a professor of the classics. Her life as such came to an end in 1938 when her entire family was forced to move to Prague. Her family attempted in vain to obtain visas to emigrate out of Czechoslovakia, and Roubíčková was forbidden to attend school by 1939. In 1941 she and her family were forced into the Theresienstadt (Terezín) ghetto. There Roubíčková spent several years before she was smuggled out of the ghetto during a typhus epidemic by a Czech train engineer with whom she had become friendly. The rest of her family perished in Auschwitz.

Roubíčková's only published work, We're Alive and Life Goes On: A Theresienstadt Diary, reflects her experiences as an inhabitant of the Theresienstadt ghetto. Although she is not a well-known Holocaust writer, her contribution to Holocaust literature should not be overlooked. Indeed, this work is informative about her life as a young girl in the ghetto and shows the dreadful conditions under which she was forced to live and ultimately survive. Her experiences are comparable to those of Arnošt Lustig and Anne Frank , though Roubíčková's writing is not nearly as detailed or in-depth as Frank's. In 1996 Roubíčková had her memoirs video recorded by Chanan Adar, who then donated this video to the Theresienstadt Memorial Museum. In these memoirs Roubíčková tells of the hatred her family was up against in their town of Žatec, and she relates in detail her job as a farm worker and shepherdess in Theresienstadt. The sheep that were under her care had been brought to Theresienstadt from the Czech town of Lidice, which was completely destroyed by the Nazis in 1942 in retaliation for the assassination by Czech underground fighters of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi "Protector of Bohemia and Moravia," known as "Hangman Heydrich" and "The Butcher of Prague" by those who despised him.

After a six-year separation from her fiancé, Richard Roubíček, the two married shortly after their reunion.

—Cynthia A. Klíma

See the essay on We're Alive and Life Goes On: A Theresienstadt Diary.