In 2008, Dennis Carlyle Darling was directing a University of Texas summer abroad photojournalism program in Prague. While there, he accepted an invitation from another college program to fill an empty seat on a bus to Terezin, the World War II Nazi ghetto located 70 kilometers (43 miles) north of the city.
Sixteen years later, that decision has resulted in “Borrowed Time: Survivors of Nazi Terezin Remember,” a collection of photographs of Terezin survivors by Darling, along with recollections of their Holocaust experiences. The book was published in January of this year.
“After seeing Terezin and meeting a survivor who spoke with us, I decided to take my students there the next summer. I took my first photograph for this project then. It was of the survivor who was our guide,” Darling told The Times of Israel.
Having previously never heard of Terezin or met a Holocaust survivor, Darling learned that Terezín (called Theresienstadt by the Germans) was a former 18th-century military garrison in which the Nazis imprisoned Czech, German, Austrian, Dutch, Danish and other Jews until they could be transported to Auschwitz or other death camps.
Since the Terezin ghetto was used for Nazi propaganda purposes, the Jews were allowed a relatively robust cultural and educational life. However, behind the facade, the conditions were so horrific that more than 33,000 of the 141,000 Jews imprisoned there died from malnutrition, disease and mistreatment.
“My father was a US Air Force navigator in the war. He was shot down and interned as a prisoner of war in a camp that turned out to have been nearby. I guess this made me feel a connection. My father’s story also helped when I spoke to survivors and asked them to participate in my project,” Darling said.
Darling, a professor of photojournalism, social documentary and graphic design at the University of Texas in Austin for 40 years until recently retiring, shot a handful of portraits in the Czech Republic and thought that would be it.
“But then people started suggesting other survivors they knew that I should contact. After a while, I started getting good at tracking people. By about 2011 or 2012 I got my groove and I also found a Czech woman who could help me with translation,” Darling said.
By 2021, Darling had made multiple trips — at his own expense — to different countries, including the US, Canada, the Czech Republic, the UK, France and Israel to photograph and interview Terezin survivors. Mainly children and teenagers during the war, these were now the last Jews alive to provide first-hand testimony of what it was like to be held captive in the ghetto.
In one case, Darling took a week off work to travel to London to wait for a 15-minute visit with Alice Herz-Sommer (née Aliza Herz), the famed classical pianist who died in 2014 at age 110.
In the text next to Herz-Sommer’s photograph in the book is a quote from her about times Franz Kafka, a family friend, spent at her home, often talking about his writings with Herz-Sommer’s mother.
“Kafka was a slightly strange man, kind, indecisive and always ‘dressed for the office.’ He didn’t talk a lot but rather loved quiet and nature. We frequently went on trips together.”
After photographing Herz-Sommer, Darling used the picture he took of her as his calling card when contacting other survivors he reached out to.
“Not only did I really like the photograph, but it helped because everyone knew Alice. I would put a copy of the photo in letters I would send people asking to visit them. It was a sort of way of establishing trust,” Darling said.
Eschewing digital photography, Darling carried heavy film camera equipment with him, as well as a scanner, to all the visits. By the end of the project, he had photographed and interviewed 150 survivors. Only 74 of them made it into the book.
“The worst part of the project was the editing because we had to leave so many people out of the book. Generally speaking, the criteria for making it in was a good photo that also had a compelling story to go with it. There were some people who I am sure had an important testimony to share, but they did not convey it [well] to me,” Darling said.
The number of survivors included was also limited because of practical reasons. As it is, the book is 288 pages long, weighs five pounds, and spans two feet (.6 meters) across when open.
When asked whether any encounters with Terezin survivors particularly stand out in his mind, Darling answered that there were two.
The first was with Czech survivor Eva Macourková. Darling sat across from her at her kitchen table as she recounted how she, her older sister Hana and their mother who was in poor health had been deported to Terezín and then on to several work camps. The three were allowed to stay together and for months the sisters did their best to keep their feeble mother from working herself to death. Despite all their care, she died alone during the very last days of the war leaving the two young girls, who had been separated from her, to fend for themselves.
After Macourková finished telling Darling the story, she rose from the table and walked into her kitchen pantry, and closed the door. She remained there in the dark for several minutes loudly crying. Rubbing her eyes, she finally returned to the kitchen to say goodbye and show the photographer out.
“I will never forget sitting there on the other side of the pantry door and listening to the grief still raw after more than six decades,” Darling said.
The second encounter Darling said he vividly remembered was the time he spent with Eva Hermannová, who as a child in Terezin, kept a small diary.
“Few of the children and fewer of the diaries survived the war. Eva and her diary did. She had always been a very creative child. In prison she drew and pasted various things she found at the camp in her diary,” Darling said.
As he leafed through Hermannová’s diary, he came across a section with small white envelopes pasted to the page next to rows of names with numbers. Hermannová explained that the names were fellow child prisoners who had been shipped out to another camp and that the numbers belonged to the transports that they left in.
She said that it was common for good friends to exchange locks of hair with those leaving on a transport the following morning. Those hair clippings were contained in the white envelopes glued to Eva’s diary pages.
“Eva carefully opened one of the envelopes and laid a clump of curls in the palm of my hand. I asked her who it belonged to. She said a friend who was murdered at Auschwitz. I was holding the very last tangible remains of a child gassed, then incinerated, by the Nazis at Auschwitz,” Darling said.
“It was a sobering moment that has stuck with me all during this project, and probably will for life,” he said.
Borrowed Time: Survivors of Nazi Terezín Remember by Dennis Carlyle Darling
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