Herbert Thomas Mandl - Life

Life

Mandl was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, the son of Czech Jewish parents, the engineer Daniel Mandl and Hajnalka Mandl. He was educated in Jewish and Czech schools in Bratislava and in Brno. He began to play the violin at the age of 6.

The Mandls were living in Brno when the remains of Czechoslovakia were annexed by Nazi Germany on March 15, 1939. Mandl was 13 at the time. In 1942, Mandl and his parents were deported to the Terezín (Theresienstadt) ghetto. In 1944, Mandl and his father were transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, thence to several Dachau-Kaufering satellite camps, where Mandl's father died. At the end of World War II, Mandl was repatriated to Czechoslovakia where he was reunited with his mother.

Once free, Mandl returned to his studies. He was ultimately awarded a doctorate in the performing arts (violin) from the Academy of Performing Arts (Akademie Múzických Umění) in Prague, where he met his future wife, Jaroslava (“Slavi”), a concert pianist. While professors of music at the Janáček Conservatory in Ostrava, the Mandls developed several plans for escaping to the West from the oppressive conditions in Communist Czechoslovakia. Mandl himself finally succeeded in Cairo, where he broke away from his tourist group and applied for asylum at the United States Embassy in Cairo. Initially, he was suspected of being a spy, and the CIA interrogated him for months. When released, he was placed in a refugee camp in Zirndorf, West Germany. (“There were as many spies as real refugees there,” he had said of Zirndorf.) Once granted the status of political refugee, Mandl moved to Cologne, where he became the private secretary of Heinrich Böll, the recipient of the 1972 Nobel Prize for Literature. Since Mandl’s wife Slavi had remained behind in Ostrava (this was by the Mandls' prior agreement), Böll had agreed to help smuggle her to the West. He engaged a professional illusionist to build a hideaway in his personal automobile, a Citroen DS-19, drove to Czechoslovakia with his entire family and smuggled Slavi out. This incident is documented in Mandl's autobiography, Durst, Musik, Geheime Dienste published in Germany in 1995 and in a Bavarian television film directed by Gloria de Siano.

In later years, Mandl produced and edited cultural broadcasts that were transmitted to Communist Eastern Europe by the West German radio station Deutsche Welle in Cologne. He and Slavi twice emigrated to the USA, where he studied psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington and was supervisor on the ward for the criminally insane at Western State Hospital in Tacoma, Washington. In 1971, the Mandls permanently returned to West Germany, settling in Meerbusch-Büderich (de). Mandl found a position as a professor of English at the Roman Catholic evening gymnasium (Nikolaus-Groß-Abendgymnasium (de)) in Essen, where he remained until his retirement.

In addition to his other talents, Mandl was an inventor. He developed and patented two very different devices. One was a transparent model of a human head (the phonetic head) that contained movable speech organs and was used to help teach pronunciation of foreign languages. The second was the Suggestometer, a complex device that could be used to measure human suggestibility empirically – something that was considered impossible by research psychologists at the time. Mandl was also a very successful psychotherapist who continued to provide mental health treatment even after his retirement. During the last decades of his life, Mandl was a very active as a contemporary witness to the musical scene in the Terezin (Theresienstadt) ghetto; he had played the violin in the camp orchestra in 1943/44 under the batons of Karel Ančerl and Carlo Sigmund Taube.

Mandl was a tireless contemporary witness to the horrors of life under totalitarian regimes and particularly to the Holocaust, traveling throughout Europe and North America to deliver his message. As one of the few survivors of the Terezín ghetto musical scene, he provided expert eyewitness accounts for this extraordinary phenomenon.