Otto Kende 1912 - 1945

Born 19.3.1912 in České Budějovice
Died 10.5.1945 in Mauthausen

Biography

Otto Kende was born Otto Kohn, son of Josef (born on 27 July 1882 in Volyně) and Helena, née Schladnichová (born on 26 August 1888 in České Budějovice). According to the archives of the Jewish community in České Budějovice, he was not circumcised immediately – perhaps for health reasons. Otto did not grow up as an only child. He had two brothers: the younger, Erich (born 1920 in České Budějovice), died in March 1945 in the Dachau concentration camp; the elder, Rudolf (born 1910 in České Budějovice) was confined to a wheelchair and required the help of a carer. Rudolf Kende, a very gifted composer, was the only member of the family to survive the occupation. He had still not been deported when the Theresienstadt ghetto was liberated.[1]

For sake of his business dealings in Berlin and Vienna and as a result of increasing anti-Semitism, Josef’s father’s siblings decided to officially change their surname from Kohn to Kende in October 1920. From then on their company bore the new name Brüder Kende Budweis (‘Kende Brothers, Budvar’).[2]

From the winter semester of 1930/31 Otto Kende was enrolled at the Faculty of Law of the German University in Prague. Except for some short interruptions, he stayed in the capital for the duration of his studies, which he successfully concluded in January 1935 by gaining a doctorate.[3] During the registration of the ‘Protectorate Jews’ before the start of the deportations to the Lodz ghetto and later Theresienstadt ghetto in autumn 1941, he lived in Prague V., at 11 Eliška Krásnohorská Street. On 4 December 1942 he was deported to Theresienstadt in ‘Transport J’. Together with 999 other young men he was ordered to work on the construction of the infrastructure of the ghetto. Otto Kende was assigned to head the labour bureau, which was responsible for the allocation and supervision of the work of the ghetto prisoners housed in the Sudeten barracks.

The rest of the Kende family were taken to join their son and brother Otto in Theresienstadt as part of the Sondertransport-Einzelreisende (‘special transport for individual travellers’) in March 1942. While his mother, father and younger brother Erich were only assigned to the transports to Auschwitz in autumn 1944, Otto Kende had already been transported in December 1943. This may have been related to the loss of his previously essential job after the clearance of the Sudeten barracks in Theresienstadt.

Otto Kende arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, after a harrowing two-day journey, on 20 December 1943, and the whole transport was housed in camp section B II b, where the so-called ‘Theresienstadt Family Camp’ had been in existence since September 1943. According to the memoirs of Rudolf Blum, Kende was given an important function as head clerk in the infirmary.[4] What was different about this Theresienstadt camp inside the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex was that the deported prisoners were not subjected to the infamous ‘selection’ but, for reasons that remain unknown, were allowed to live for a period of six months – a so-called quarantine – and subsequently killed. This happened with the September transports in March 1944 and would do so again in the case of the December transport in June 1944. According to the memoirs of a fellow Theresienstadt prisoner, Otto Kende did not take advantage of the opportunity offered by the numerous Auschwitz selections to go to Schwarzheide in a labour detachment, but remained in the camp because of an unknown young woman.[5]

Trace of Otto Kende only re-emerges in January 1945, after the evacuation of the Auschwitz complex, in the Mauthausen concentration camp. Here he was given the prisoner number 117905. The surviving prisoner index cards show that Otto Kende registered as a physician on his arrival in the camp, which testifies to his ability to adapt to the adverse conditions. ‘Spectacles wearer’ was noted on the card as a distinguishing feature. After four days of camp quarantine, he was assigned to forced labour in the Melk subcamp (‘Quarz’) from 29 January. Here he, along with thousands of other prisoners, carried out slave labour for the company Quarz GmbH, a subsidiary of the Steyr-Daimler-Puch corporation. Otto Kende lived to see his liberation, but the torments inflicted on him in the concentration camps nevertheless brought his life to a premature end on 10 May 1945.[6]

Tomáš Fedorovič

Terezín Memorial

 

Translation into English: Joanna White

 

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