Partner Jan Mautner
Queer Places:
Richardstraße 7, 52062 Aachen, Germany
Alfred
"Fredy" Hirsch (11 February 1916 – 8 March 1944) was a German-Jewish athlete, sports teacher and Zionist youth movement leader, notable for helping thousands of Jewish children during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in Prague, Theresienstadt concentration camp, and Auschwitz. Hirsch was the deputy supervisor of children at Theresienstadt and the supervisor of the children's block at the Theresienstadt family camp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
Because of his German extraction, charisma, and careful appearance, he was able to convince SS guards to grant privileges to the children, including exemptions from deportation and extra rations, which saved their lives at least temporarily. Hirsch and his assistants maintained clandestine education under the difficult circumstances. Hirsch's insistence on exercise, discipline, and strict hygiene reduced death rates among the children.
The family camp was due to be liquidated on 8 March 1944; Hirsch's popularity made him a natural leader for an uprising. According to some accounts, he committed suicide in order not to have to witness the deaths of his charges; alternately, he was poisoned by Jewish doctors who would have been killed if an uprising had broken out.
Hirsch was born in Aachen to Heinrich and Olga Hirsch on 11 February 1916; his father, who ran a butcher shop, died when he was ten years old. According to Fredy's niece, Raquel Masel, his brother, Paul Hirsch (1914–1979), was not close to their mother because of her bitterness. Their poor relationship encouraged Fredy and Paul to join youth organizations.[1][2][3] Both brothers attended the Aachener Couven-Gymnasium, which was not a Jewish school.[4] Fredy left in March 1931 when his mother moved, but there is no evidence that he attended another school, and apparently he continued to live in Aachen.[5] The Jewish community of Aachen was well-integrated; there was little antisemitism in Aachen before the Nazi Party came to power in 1933. Hirsch was already giving lectures at the age of 15.[1][3]
Hirsch emigrated to Czechoslovakia at age 19. A sportsman, he became a much-loved Zionist youth leader in the Theresienstadt ghetto and, later, in Auschwitz. Prisoners in Theresienstadt knew Hirsch was gay. Two recent biographical documentaries, Heaven in Auschwitz by Aaron and Esther Cohen, and Dear Fredy by Rubi Gat, as well as Dirk Kämper’s book, address his homosexuality. New research by Anna Hajkova and Alena Mikovcová into the Maccabi Brno association and interviews with eyewitnesses reveal that Hirsch’s partner of many years was a medical student named
Jan Mautner.
Hirsch met his boyfriend in Brno, Czechoslovakia, in 1936; the two men both taught sports for Maccabi Brno, a Zionist sports association. Jan, also known as Jenda, was born in 1912, grew up in Olomouc, studied law in Prague and then medicine in Brno. The couple published articles together in the Maccabi journal, and Mautner translated Hirsch’s writings from German into Czech. Hirsch struggled with the difficult Czech language throughout his life.
In an interview, Ruth Kopečková, born in 1923 in Brno, survivor of Theresienstadt, Raasiku, Stutthof, and Neuengamme camps,
said that Mautner and Hirsch were a well-known couple in her hometown. For two years, Hirsch and Mautner organized winter trips for Jewish young people, during which Mautner’s mother cooked wonderful meals for the hungry teenagers.
In interwar Czechoslovakia, as in many countries at the time, both male and female homosexuality was punishable by law. At the same time, there was a lively activist movement pushing for decriminalization. Brno was in fact a key site of queer history: In 1932 the World League for Sexual Reform, led by the famous German Jewish sexual reformer
Magnus Hirschfeld, convened there. Hirsch and Mautner lived together,
and most likely they had the blessings of Mautner’s parents.
In March 1939, Hirsch moved to Prague, where he continued to work for the Maccabi organization. Mautner, who was unable to complete his degree after the Germans closed Czech universities in 1939 following a student protest, followed his boyfriend in April 1940. That was an unusual decision for a single young man then: During the persecution, Jewish parents and their adult children usually lived together and faced deportation as a family unit. Mautner’s parents remained in Brno. The two men taught together sports at the Jewish center Hagibor (”The Hero”). In the final years before the deportations began, Hagibor offered the only recreational activities for Jewish youth in Prague.
In November 1941, Hirsch was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto.
Together with Gonda Redlich, the 25-year-old Zionist activist, he became the
head of the ghetto’s Youth Care department, led sports education, and
attempted to instill hope and self-respect in children and teenagers, whose
experience growing up had often been marked by denigration and insults.
Six months later, in July 1942, Mautner was also sent to Theresienstadt.
Mautner’s parents had preceded him there; they were then deported to Zamość
ghetto, where they were murdered soon after. Hirsch remained in Theresienstadt for almost two years. In September 1943, he was deported to Auschwitz with 5,000 men, women, and children to what became known as the Family Camp. Even in Auschwitz, during the last six months of his life, Hirsch managed to set up a children’s block, attempting to shelter the youngsters from the horrible brutalities of camp life. On March 8, 1944, Hirsch and the remaining members of his transport were all murdered.
Jenda Mautner was deported to Auschwitz in December 1943. In July 1944, he was selected for forced labor and sent to Schwarzheide, a satellite camp of Sachsenhausen, located in the Lusatia coal-mining region of Saxony, Germany. There the prisoners were forced to work in hydrogenation plants that transformed coal into high-octane aircraft fuel to aid German industry. Less than half the prisoners survived the grueling forced labor and the death marches at the end of the war. In April 1945, the SS chased the prisoners on foot back towards Theresienstadt.
Mautner was among those who made it out alive, though not unscathed. He emerged with severe tuberculosis and a decimated family; his parents and his sister were murdered. He later left the Jewish community and changed his surname to Martin.
Soon after the war, Mautner lived with the family of his cousin, who survived the war in Palestine. Mautner’s great-nephew, who is today over 80 years old and lives in Australia, is one of the last people to remember him. “Jan was flamboyant and very intelligent,” he recalled. “I tested his memory, with some astonishing results. He was apparently able to memorize a long list of words and repeat them both in the original order and in reverse order. Mautner said that he never had to study hard, he just read the material before an exam and that was sufficient.” When I asked about Mautner’s sexual orientation, it turned out that “flamboyant” was a code word for gay.
Mautner had a few happy years following the war. He passed his professional exams and was able to work as physician. He also found a new love, Walter Löwy, a pharmacist whom he met in Schwarzheide. Löwy and Mautner lived together in a Prague apartment next to the leafy Stromovka park. But in 1951, Jan died of tuberculosis.
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