WEBER, Ilse

  Ilse Weber (11 January 1903 – 6 October 1944) née Herlinger, was born in Witkowitz near Mährisch-Ostrau. A Jewish poet, she wrote in German, most notably songs and theater pieces for Jewish children. She married Willi Weber in 1930. She was voluntarily transported to Auschwitz with the children of Theresienstadt and killed in the gas chambers, along with her son, Tommy.

As a child she learned to sing and play guitar, lute, mandolin and balalaika, but apparently never considered a career as a musician. In 1930 she married Willi Weber and settled in Prague, where she wrote for children's periodicals and became a producer for Czech Radio. Following the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939 the Webers were able to get their oldest son Hanuš safely to Sweden on a "Kindertransport" before they were confined to Prague's Jewish Ghetto. Hanuš was sent first to the U.K. to live with a friend of his mother who was the daughter of a Swedish diplomat, and he may well be the Hans Weber listed as No. 1292 in the records of the kindertransports to the U.K. organised by Nicholas Winton. He survived the war in Sweden, and lives in Stockholm in retirement. His son, Tommy, born in 1977, is named in honor of his younger brother, murdered with his mother in Auschwitz.

The Webers arrived at the Theresienstadt concentration camp in February 1942. Ilse Weber worked as a night nurse in the camp's children's infirmary, doing everything she could for the young patients without the aid of medicine (which was forbidden to Jewish prisoners). She wrote around 60 poems during her imprisonment and set many of them to music, employing deceptively simple tunes and imagery to describe the horror of her surroundings. In performance she accompanied herself on guitar. Her songs include "Lullaby," "I Wandered Through Theresienstadt," "The Lidice Sheep," "Wiegala," "And the Rain Falls," and "Avowal of Belief."
When her husband was deported to Auschwitz in October 1944, Ilse Weber volunteered to join him with their son Tommy because she didn't want to break up the family. She and the boy were sent to the gas chamber on arrival. Willi Weber survived them by 30 years.