GUILDERLAND — Ela Stein Weissberger has stories to tell. She speaks with urgency, pausing after making her points. She quickly starts again, giving the impression that she has not yet told the whole story and that she hasn’t said everything that needs to be said.

Over 60 years ago, when she was 11 years old, she arrived at the Terezin concentration camp, better known by the German name Theresienstadt, in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and saw young dead men hanging in the town square.

During her three-and-a-half years at the camp, Ela Stein found art.

She played the cat in all 55 performances of the children’s opera Brundibar, an allegory in which a group of kids, with a sparrow, cat and dog, chase away an evil organ-grinder. While at the camp, she was taught by artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, who hid artwork made by her students in a suitcase. The paintings were found years later, and are now in a museum in Prague.

At 12, Weissberger was in a Nazi propaganda film, Hitler Gives the Jews a City.

Now, she travels around the world, telling others about her life and her experiences during the Holocaust in order to keep the memory alive of children who didn’t survive. Weissberger, with Susan Goldman Rubin, wrote The Cat with the Yellow Star, a memoir about her experiences at the Terezin camp.
American children, she said, are very close to her heart, and she feels they are a bridge between her and a new generation. "This is my goal now before I go," Weissberger said.

She will speak here next week.

Years ago

Weissberger’s path to a starring role in Brundibar began in 1938, when her family was expelled from its home in Czechoslovakia. There was a big demonstration against Jews, she said.

Her father was taken by the Gestapo and the family never saw him again, she said.

She knew something was happening, but she really didn’t know exactly what it meant to be Jewish because all Jews were assimilated in Czechoslovakia, she said.

While both of Weissberger’s parents were Jewish, she said, many children were from mixed marriages.

The Nazis began registering the Jews in Prague and the children were expelled from school, she said; she had only been in school for two years before she was expelled in 1940.

In Theresienstadt, the composer of Brundibar, Hans Krasa, reconstructed the full score of the opera from memory, and the set designer, who had also been sent to the camp, recreated the set. Weissberger was cast as the cat.

She wore her sister’s ski pants and her mother’s sweater, she said. She wasn’t allowed to wear her wooden shoes, she said, and a man from Prague had a little box with left-over shoe polish, so he made her whiskers and put a little polish on her feet so they wouldn’t be completely white.

The opera tells the story of a fatherless sister and brother whose mother is very sick. A doctor tells them she needs milk to get better, but they have no money to buy it. They go to sing in the marketplace to raise money but the evil organ-grinder, Brundibar, chases them away. With the help of three gifted animals and the town’s children, they chase Brundibar away and sing in the market square.
"Brundibar, in our eyes, was Hitler as we will overcome this evil man," Weissberger said.

The finale, which she sang in the Czech language, was always very powerful and Brundibar was very popular.
"It was really the most popular opera," she said, "and tickets for it were really hard to get."

But real life at Terezin was not as uplifting as the opera.

Weissberger’s best friend was taken to Auschwitz in October, 1944 and returned around March of 1945, she said. When her friend came back to the camp in Theresienstadt, Weissberger was the first to recognize her, she said, though she was almost unrecognizable.
"Her head was shaven so she didn’t have no hair. It was snow on the ground and she came with torn stockings. She didn’t have even the wooden shoes anymore," said Weissberger.

Now, they are best friends again and sometimes meet twice a year, she said.

After the war
After the war, the first question Weissberger asked her aunt was: Can I go to school"
Her aunt replied, "No, you can’t go like this to school. We have to make you a nice dress...Look, you are so skinny."
"That’s what really happened," she said, "and we were so undernourished after the camps."
When she speaks to kids, Weissberger said, she shows them her body, and says, "You see what she did to me" Now I have to go on diet."

When she was 15 years old, Weissberger went to school for one year; her teacher was a young man who survived the war and had smuggled the pianos into the camp that were used for Brundibar.

After the war, the Communists took over and she didn’t want to join the Communist Party, she said, so she immigrated to Israel with her mother and sister.

She became a soldier in the Israeli Army for two years and worked for the secret service, drawing maps.

One day, she picked up a hitchhiker. He became her husband.

In March of 1958, her husband asked her if she would go to America with him.

She did.

Now

Weissberger has lived in her home in Tappan for 42 years. Each year, she said, she travels to the Czech Republic, and, on her next trip, she will bring copies of her book, The Cat with the Yellow Star, to the museum in Theresienstadt, the camp where she spent her childhood.

Her daughter, who is 54 years old and speaks Spanish, wants to join her for a trip to see Brundibar in Madrid, Spain.

Her children, Weissberger said, understand what she is doing.
"They’re not living with me any longer," she said. "I don’t see them too often, but we are in touch all the time."

Weissberger said she came to America in June of 1958.
"It will be 50 years now, and my accent is still so bad and I’m telling the kids I’m almost 50 years in America so it may be possibility that I will lose my accent. I speak other languages, but, I don’t know, only probably in English, they feel my accent. But that’s OK. They understand.
"I don’t have such a big vocabulary," Weissberger said, "but what I always think is I don’t have written anything down for me to speak, and I’m saying, if I don’t speak from my heart, I wouldn’t speak, and my friends are in my heart till I die."

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Ela Stein Weissberger will speak at the Guilderland Public Library at 2288 Western Avenue on Dec. 19 at 7 p.m. Tickets are free and available. To order tickets, call the library’s public library adult reference department at 456-2400 ext. 7. A private reception will be held at 6 p.m. To purchase tickets for the reception or for more information, call 456-2400 ext. 12.

Brundibar and Amahl and the Night Visitors will be performed at Proctor’s Theatre in Schenectady from Dec. 20 to Dec. 23. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evening performances are at 7:30 p.m., and matinees will be on Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m.

Tickets may be purchased on-line or by calling the box office.