Marta Dušánková

“Time was passing quickly and it was about to be over. We had been sent there for ten months. The boys from Kolín went home when the ten months were over. But we were still there. We thus drew lots to decide who would write the petition, and of course, it was me who got picked up to write a letter to minister Moravec. And so I wrote him a letter that we had been sent there for ten months and that there were boys from Kolín as well and they left precisely after ten months of work but we were still there. Meanwhile I used my leave permit and I went home. Right after I left I got a phone call from the girls that they had received an order to go home. I didn’t go back there anymore. I had left my bedding and all my stuff there, but I didn’t go there anymore. They were released because the minister had arranged everything so that we could return home. The letter from him was addressed to me, but I haven’t got it… I could have had a keepsake. We were then sent to the Troja neighbourhood in Prague to work in some factory there, it was still no end to all this. We worked there for a month or two.”

“In the factory there were Dutch and French people working in the same workshop with us. It was terrible. They stayed in the camp and I can still remember it vividly: they were cutting bread with a saw. They had an old and hard loaf of bread, and they used a saw to cut it and then they ate it. I befriended one of the girls and – now I can admit, I was a thief – there were two shops, two butchers and general stores, and they kept food stamps in small bowls there. We went to shop there. We needed to invent some pretext to make the shop assistant walk away for a moment. We therefore went there to buy minced meat, because he had to go to an adjacent room to prepare it. Meanwhile I would grab the food stamps in the bowl and we would go to the other shop to buy food using these food stamps. Out of the ten of us, the other eight girls didn’t know anything about it. But we were scared every time the door opened because we would think that they had come for us.”

“Men were being issued food stamps for cigarettes. Mrs. Kotrbová, who was a very pretty lady, which was my luck, was going to see him [a German official], and she kept telling him that I was still not feeling well. He accepted the food stamps. The boy that I dated did not smoke and he was thus giving the food stamps to her and she would always bring cigarettes to that German official. But I was told I needed some official note from a doctor. In the neighbouring street, in Tolstoy Street, there was a Jewish doctor, with the Star of David, but he had not been deported anywhere, because he had his hands burnt from radium and they thus let him treat his patients; he was always wearing gloves. My mom hit me over my shoulder with a brush several times, it still hurts even now, and spread garlic over my shoulder and then she called the doctor. The first question he asked me was: ´What is your year of birth?´ Then he says: ´It is better to while away the time in bed than to be sent over there.´ He gave me some medicine. But it was not enough, and he thus sent me to another doctor, who also lived in Tolstoy Street. I went there and I told him: ´Doctor, I need an official sick note, and I need to stay sick.´ I explained it to him very politely, and he says: ´Well, we’ll give you some injections then.´ He either injected me only with an empty needle or with water, he did not give me any real shots, but it was just to keep him safe and I he was thus able to issue a certificate that I needed to continue my treatment.”