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Building L417, Room 7
November/December 2007
by Stephen Vider ’03

Michael Gruenbaum ’60MCP as 12 years old when he was sent to the concentration camp at Terezin (Theresienstadt), about 40 miles from his home city of Prague. Terezin was a showplace, where foreigners could be reassured that all was well with the Jews, but it was also a first stop en route to death; more than half of the estimated 144,000 Jews who passed through it were sent east to the extermination camps.

Upon his arrival in November 1942, Gruenbaum was separated from his mother and sister (his father had been killed a year earlier by the Gestapo) and placed with 40 other boys in Building L417, Room 7. The boys of Room 7—known as the Eagles, or, in Hebrew, Nesarim—were supervised by another captive, 20-year-old Franta Maier. Of the 15,000 children sent to Terezin, just 1,100 survived, 12 from the Nesarim.

After the war, Gruenbaum emigrated to Cuba and then the United States. He studied civil engineering at MIT and city planning at Yale. His story, along with those of Maier and eight other survivors from Room 7, is recounted in Nesarim, a 2004 book by his late wife, Thelma. Stephen Vider '03 spoke with him at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Y: In Nesarim, your wife writes that the book was your idea.

G: I thought that these were real success stories—how these kids, some of whom went really through hell, survived and made something out of themselves. That was the main point, that plus the fact that we all stuck together. There were other rooms in that building, and those kids didn’t keep in touch as closely as we did. There was no group spirit like we had.

Y: You were the last person she interviewed. How come it took so long?

G: I was—and I’m still—reluctant to talk about it. I find people who did not go through that experience can’t fathom what it was really like. Finally, we were in the Swiss Alps, it was raining, and she kept badgering me about it, and I said, “OK, why don’t you put the tape recorder on and we can get it over with.”

Y: Are you still in touch with others from the Nesarim?

G: We had our first reunion in this house in 1989, for the people on the East Coast. When the Communists were overthrown in 1989 in Czechoslovakia, suddenly it became a little easier to communicate with certain people. And we decided to hold the reunion in the Czech Republic, in a small village south of Prague. Since then we have had three other reunions. In fact, Franta just called a while ago. He still looks after all his children all the time. Looking back, we are all astounded at what he accomplished, keeping everybody disciplined, quiet, entertained under terrible circumstances.

Y: Your mother also played an important part in your survival.

G: She was working for a Dutch artist, [fellow prisoner] Jo Spier, who was making things for the Germans. One of the things that my mother was doing was teddy bears—I guess for Christmas. We were [scheduled for] the last transports [to Auschwitz] in October 1944, and she went to Mr. Spier and said, “I just got called up for the transports.” And he went to the Germans and said, “You won’t get your teddy bears.” And the Germans said, “Pull her out.” Spier said, “But she had two children.” “Okay, pull them out, but no one else—that’s it.”

Y: Many people today know about Terezin because of the large number of artists and writers who were imprisoned there. Were you involved in the arts?

G: I know the first act of Carmen inside out because of the children’s chorus. And I was in [Hans Krasa's children’s opera] Brundibar.

Y: What did you think about the fact that Brundibar was revived last year at Lincoln Center and the Yale Rep?

G: I’m surprised it’s really caught on. At our last reunion in Prague, my friend Tommy arranged a performance for my group, and frankly we were all pretty much in tears. It was the first time that we had seen it since Terezin. But the guy who was really crying was Franta Maier—I think because he was thinking of all the kids in Brundibar who didn’t survive.

Y: How did you end up at Yale?

G: I started at MIT when I was 20, and I finished in three years. I was always good in math, and I was very interested in things that moved, so that's what led me into transportation. Yale, strangely enough, was home to a particular department called the Bureau of Highway Traffic. So I got a scholarship and we moved to New Haven. I ended up staying at Yale and getting a master’s degree in city planning.

Y: What have you been doing since you retired?

G: The last couple of years that my wife was alive, she was writing another book, on grandparenting. We have close to 50 interviews on tape, and unfortunately she passed away before she was able to do anything with them. But I’m still trying to find the time to finish that book, because we worked on it together.

Y: I understand your three sons, David, Peter, and Leon, also got some publicity recently.

G: For about five years, they played as a band [called Dapele] in the Boston area. And they made this album of their own compositions. But that was 30 years ago. Last December, out of the blue I get e-mails from several people in Japan asking me how they could get this recording. It turns out that the Hi Fi Records store in Tokyo got hold of two used copies, and they were selling them on their website for $210 apiece. I still had a couple hundred copies, so I sent out a few to Japan.

Y: Are you still involved in music?

G: I play the radio very well.  

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