“A train with cargo cars arrived to Ebrach. These were regular cars used for transporting goods. They made us fit fifty people into one car and we rode to Straubing. It is near the Czechoslovak border. It was a prison in Bavaria. We were to spend a couple of more days there.”
“A German housewife gave us some eggs. I had two eggs and even this was too much for me. They were raw. Those who have eaten more even suffered from perforation of intestines as a result. It was terrible. Well, we escaped there and hid there. Only the SS men were still fighting, but the regular army was throwing their weapons away. They were giving up the fight. We were looking from above at a convoy of cars riding under us. The American army was advancing. The village where we were was all in white: white bed sheets and flags as a sign of surrender. And on April 29, 1945 I was liberated.”
“Nuremberg was in ruins. When you looked out of these cars, there were only remains of walls. You could not see a single normal building which would remain standing. Everything has been destroyed. It was a shocking sight. I still remember it. We passed through Regensburg. We arrived there and there was an air raid. The wardens locked us in the train cars and ran into a shelter. They left us in the train cars in the railway station. When the planes passed, they unlocked the cars again. They just let us out. That was because fighter planes flew over the area.”
“My father was a political officer in the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party, and my mother was a housewife. He was transferred to Pardubice, which was a regional centre at that time, to serve in the regional committee. He worked there as the regional secretary and his duty was to attend meetings that they were holding every Saturday and Sunday, they had certain subsections there, and he would always go to these meetings in order to keep in touch with the party members. He was presenting his views there and listening to their opinions and to the petitions of the members. His boss at that time was Bohumil Laušman who later became the minister of industry.”
“There was a one-room flat next to ours, and the neighbours had a radio mounted on the adjacent wall and they were always listening to the broadcast from London. We found out, so I took a tin cup, placed it against the wall and listened to London with them. I was thus influenced in a away. Later when I wanted to escape to the Czechoslovak army in Britain, Dad tried to dissuade me and he told me: "Don’t you think that you get there and you will immediately be given some high rank." My mother had no objections to it. Nonetheless, that was it, I had made my decision. This story encompasses the entire journey, my entire odyssey. From my journey, to the arrest, and then all the prisons, the trial in Nuremberg, the transport to the prison in Ebrach, four years there, and then the transport to Straubing, the death march, and the liberation.”
Bohumil Glückauf was born June 28, 1923 in Hostivice near Prague in the then Czechoslovakia, in a family of an official of the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party (ČSSD). The family lived in Hořelice near Prague, but they moved to Pardubice because of the father’s job. His father was later transferred to Prague, and Bohumil thus studied the higher elementary school in the Nusle neighborhood in Prague and later the Public Trade Academy in Prague-Žižkov. After graduation he started an internship in an insurance company. In 1941 he decided to leave the country and join the Czechoslovak foreign army in Great Britain. On June 16, 1941 he set out from the Prague Masaryk Station towards the Slovak border, but he was intercepted by a German guard there on June 17, 1941. Bohumil Glückauf was imprisoned in Bílá near the Slovak border, then in Frýdek-Místek, in Zlín, in Brno-Veveří and eventually he was transported to Nuremberg where he was sentenced to six years of imprisonment on October 28, 1941. At the same time he was pardoned four months of his sentence for the time he had spent in detention before the trial. He was taken to a prison in Ebrach near Bamberg, where he was interned until 1945. On April 2, 1945, he and other prisoners boarded a transport bound for a prison in the town of Straubing in Bavaria. During April 1945, he went in a death march from Straubing to the concentration camp in Dachau, but the American army was already approaching. He was liberated on April 29, 1945 and in May 1945 he returned to Prague to his parents. After the war he worked in a health insurance company for the self-employed, in an iron-mill construction company and at the Czech Technical University in Prague. His last job one year before retirement was as an office clerk in the Culture Palace, which is now the Prague Congress Centre. Bohumil Glückauf died in 2021.
