Jan Holík

“In April 1942 we loaded the boat with furniture left behind by Jews, it was good-quality antique furniture, and we carried it through the canal to Berlin. The helmsman was not Procházka, but Jarka Mokrý, who came from Velim near Kolín, and the senior boatman was Tonda Frič. We transported it to Berlin; I was looking at the lakes as we were passing by – Wannsee, and so on. We arrived to Berlin and docked there. A man came there to take over the furniture. Transportation was still not quite functioning there, the Germans were setting it up and they wanted us to stay there.”

After completing his military service Mr. Holík worked in the arms factory in Vlašim. The work there was demanding and low-paid, and he thus decided to return to river navigation. However, he had problems with his references. Only after the purges within the Party, when confusion and uncertainty prevailed among its members, they eventually gave him a recommendation to work with the navigation company. They wrote in his references that Mr. Holík was an excellent worker and that as for the political issues, he followed the principle of reasonable thinking. He was given the job and after two years of navigating locally he received permission to make trips to Hamburg as well.

“We were in Berlin in May 1942 when Heydrich was assassinated. Jews who wore the Star of David were walking there. At that time they were still allowed to move freely, but they were hungry, nobody gave them anything. They spoke to us on the embankment. Then we went to Oranienburg, where the concentration camp was. There is a narrow canal there. It was so narrow that when a boat got in, we had to push away the willow-trees to be able to pass. There was a small port where the Polish captives were loading copper sheets on a ship. The Poles were marked with a yellow P, and the Russians had the word Ost written on clothes. They were hungry.”

The witness describes what happened in a basement shelter in the labour camp after a bomb had been dropped on the camp. The camp was destroyed and nearly 500 people remained buried in the shelter – inside there were Czechs doing the forced labour together with the camp guards. Panic ensued, and one boy was trodden upon by others and died. People panicked, the ceiling began to burn through and there was nowhere to escape. Heat, panic, desperate cries, debris, and detonations of bombs – hell. A nearby hotel got hit as well and the detonation damaged the camp building: small holes opened in the walls, and the people were able to climb out one by one and thus save their lives.