“My name is Miloš Čulík, I was born in Očová in Slovakia on November 23rd, 1924. My father was a police officer, he got a post in Slovakia. He was an Italian legionnaire. Later he divorced my mother and I left for Roudnice nad Labem at my Granddad's to be brought up. I carried on living there. I got trained as an auto-mechanic. After a year they opened the Secondary School of Engineering so I went there. As for the next steps in my life, you are formed the way you have been brought up. I grew up with the Sokol and Scout movement in Masaryk's Republic times, I knew nothing else. So I went to school with an idealistic belief. After Heydrich's reign, which we all experienced as seventeen-year-old boys, we thought that the situation was very bad for the Czech nation. But we could not imagine what way they were going to solve it. On Saturday June 24th, 1942 there came two buses. We were staring at them from the windows and we were wondering what they were doing there. Eventually they came indoors, they wrote all the documents and we were transported to Malá pevnost in Terezín. There was no student (demonstration – author's note). They used to commonly grumble at the local conditions under the German reign there, at the situation and repressions that emerged before Heydrich times. It was common.”
“We were left in jail for three days during the interrogation. The interrogation came after the three days. They asked especially who and how organized the liquidation of the German teachers in the town. It had absolutely nothing to do with us, we had absolutely no idea about it. When the interrogation came I was surprised by what they wanted from us. During the interrogation, among the punches from the SS men, I said I had no idea what they were talking about. The chief commissioner Felkl said: 'If you tell us how, who and what was organized, you will be released. You will go away in one week time. If you don't tell us anything, then we will shoot you dead.' He didn't learn anything from me, I knew nothing so I was sent to the group to be shot dead. So I went there and the group was becoming bigger, we were next to one another already. When we got so close to each other we said to ourselves that we were about to be shot dead. He came out in the end and said: 'You didn't tell the truth. You simply don't know anything. We shall get even with you by some other means.' An ordinary jail organization started.”
“The people were mostly intelligentsia. We used to talk to them and we were curious about their lives. They had also nothing to say. They knew what it looked like. There was a father with his son, different writers, so we talked to them. And because we couldn't go out we unscrewed the light bulb so that it was dark in there. And when they left we screwed it back. Our cells were completely at the end and you couldn't see absolutely anything in there. Then we were meeting those people... And I've got the feeling we came across Horáková but I'm not sure about it. Women were in their own camp, they were completely off. I met Feierabend, a brother of the Minister of Finance in London. I used to wash up the cups with him. He knew three languages and he was very smart. When we switched the lights off, some of them talked about their own books. Those were such sophisticated discussions. But we were so exhausted that we couldn't listen to it.”
“Roiko and Schmidt were people whom we never knew what to think about. On the one hand, he beat someone to death or something bad happened. On the other hand, he helped someone. So we had no idea what was going on in their minds.” “Have you got any personal experience?” “I had a personal experience. We stopped working on a building site and they let us starving for three days. We were ravenous after those three days. I was on the women's courtyard begging for a piece of bread. They gave it to me and I fainted. Roiko stepped over me and went on. He didn't notice me at all. He had a wife there and she was said to be quite nice. We didn't care about it. We tried to get out to a storming-party so that we had an approach to food. To be starving was a horrible thing. We were unloading goods in Schichta Factory. We were unloading forage cake and we already knew which was good and which wasn't good. Then we were unloading for example poppy seeds. So we ate poppy seeds for even two days. We used to do it like this because when you got bread in the morning and soup in the evening, then you didn't know what to do.”
“Dvořák was one of our students. They used to say about him that they had a party in the meeting and he was among them. Nobody knew what he said. He had a brilliant memory. He remembered anything but he lacked intelligence. When he was tired and couldn't work any more, he stayed lying. I came to see him in an hour or two and he was lying exactly the same way we let him. He had his hand in bandage and he didn't make a move within the two hours. Then I saw him for the last time when I went to the bathroom. He had his hand in bandage, you could practically see through the palm of his hand. Nobody took care of him. Then he was moved to a single room. It was a cell where you were stripped off your clothes and you defecated in the corner. Then he was transported to another concentration camp and I never heard of him ever since. They said that Sylva Rajtrová used to take the sketches out. They found it with her and she was sent to liquidation. It was the danger lurking all around us. We were guarded even outside, we couldn't even move. They were waiting for their every single chance.”
Miloš Čulík was born in the village Očová in Slovakia on November 23rd, 1924. But after the divorce of his parents he was brought up by his Granddad in Roudnice nad Labem. He got trained as an auto-mechanic and he went to study the Secondary School of Engineering in Roudnice nad Labem. The school dealt with the consequences of the assasination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich. On June 24th, 1942 the whole class of the Secondary School of Engineering was arrested for an alleged organization of assassinations of German teachers in Roudnice. The students were severely interrogated and transported to Terezín. They were building the camp in Terezín and then they were being taken to work in Ústí nad Labem. Miloš Čulík and some other studentes were released on November 28th, 1942. After his release, Miloš Čulík was forced to work in Metal Waren Industrie in Roudnice nad Labem. With some colleagues of his, Miloš sabotaged production and he was handed over to the Bureau of Labor and consequently to the factory Poldi Kladno. Towards the end of the war he joined the Revolutionary People’s Committee alongside lieutenant Krejči. Čulík worked as a messenger there. As a member of Army Police he went to Ústí nad Labem and he helped to calm the situation there. He graduated from the Secondary School of Engineering in Roudnice nad Labem and completed his military service. He finished his service as a lieutenant in the Air Force. He worked in Škoda Mladá Boleslav in Roudnice nad Labem for the next two months. He joined in the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party and after the Communist coup d’etat he hid in a village as he was scared of possible persecution by the Communist Party members. He got married in the village. He started working in Automa factory in Strakonice where he worked till his retirement in 1984. He died on June 18th, 2012 in Strakonice.
