Helena Borská

“The commander of our "camp", of the 1,200 people who were there, Leibhold, he was a really bad guy. But not in a way he would shot people down. He requested discipline and punished people when they were doing something against his rules. At times he punched or kicked someone, what he considered to be reasonable. I heard there was an order to liquidate us; Russian prisoners of war were already digging graves for us. But Schindler rescued us. There were many rumors about him - that he was in American intelligence service; we glorified him, we regarded him as the almighty one. However it is also a fact, that everything he had done, he achieved thanks to money, which he mainly had from Jews. They hoped the money might have redeemed their lives. Schindler sent a fake telegram to Leibhold, that he was called out to an important meeting in Prague. He left and he could not return back, thus this way Schindler saved our lives. The order to liquidate us never came true.”

“I remember a story, I was told: It happened in a house where my grandmother lived. It was the house with a porch, where toilettes were outside of the flat used by people from the whole house. It was already forbidden for Jews to go outside after 9 pm because of curfew. One man went out of his flat as he wanted to use the toilette, when a soldier standing in the street shot him down. That was my first experience of hearing that people were murdered for nothing. Until then we never realized one might had been shot for something like this.”