Karel Cígler

“In that January 1944 I was leaving for Germany, and I was decided I wouldn’t work for the Germans. When I arrived in Kassel, then of course what I did was that when they stood me in front of a machine, I didn’t understand it. I didn’t know what to do. I ran the milling machine the wrong way round and it got damaged. So the Germans put me away. I carried crates from lathe to lathe and I swept the workshop, so I didn’t work on the aircraft engines. That’s where I had the Abstand. I kept my distance from them. Some of my colleagues noticed this, and they came to me, suggesting that when there’s a bombing run, we’ll break some of the machines and leg it. We’ll exploit the confusion and leg it. Boys, that’s madness. We did it, I legged it, but the Germans caught us in the end. I said I was just running from work, that my mum was ill and I wanted to visit her. They didn’t want to release me. Of course, they interrogated me, and after spending some three weeks in Arnstadt I was taken to the Gestapo, and that’s where it started.”

“The camp by the Lužnice River in 1939 was built up to the knowledge and with the help of Prince Schwarzenberg of Orlík, who provided us with both a place to camp and the necessary planks to built it with. When the camp was over, his son, the young Schwarzenberg - not the current one [meaning Karel Schwarzenberg, a well-known Czech politician - trans.]. It was the one who died in England. So he and the gamekeeper helped us remove everything and return the meadow to its original state. I remember him, we called him ‘Prince’. They barricaded themselves up with one priest. We nicknamed the priest Paternoster. And they stocked themselves with fir cones and buckets of water, and we were supposed to capture the place before it was taken apart. We were attacking them and they were pouring water and throwing cones at us from above. They were pretty much winning when someone had the idea to cut the whole thing down, and so they gave up. We decided to cut it down. I have wonderful memories of that Schwarzenberg. He really knew it was banned. The Gestapo traversed the country and arrested people when they found a camp. They beat the children and destroyed the camps.”

“We kept it up a year, muddling them up so that they couldn’t arrest anyone. Simply, we were foiling the Gestapo’s work. My father writes in it that either someone told on me, or the Germans worked it out. Either way, they got me, and I was sentenced to life imprisonment. And off I went: Budějovice, Pečkárna, Pankrác, Terezín. Until it was turned into a ghetto, until 1940.”