“My brother rode with horses in Terezín. One of the horses bit and kicked people. Everyone was afraid to get near it, including the SS. But my brother knew how to handle the horse, and he made good use of the fact. When he rode out through the gates of the ghetto, he would carry messages, medicine, or even photographic films under the yoke or the saddle blanket. He would meet up with one railway man outside, who delivered him the items. He also secreted food in the cart. He smuggled a lot through like that, but then someone snitched on him and he had to board a transport to Auschwitz.”
“Doriska and I herded sheep in Terezín. We also took them to graze on raised buttresses around Terezín. One time the sheep pushed at each other right at the edge, until one of them fell down the buttress and died. There was a young SS man standing under the buttress. When we saw that the sheep had fallen down, Doris and I cried, we were afraid that we’d be deported as punishment. The SS man started speaking to us in Slovak, saying not to worry. That he’d see to the matter. That he had seen everything and that he’d confirm that the sheep had been pushing at each other until one of them fell down. So he loaded it up on to a tractor and took it to the canteen. And he really did arrange it so that we didn’t get into any trouble because of it.”
“The coffins weren’t nailed up. When someone was buried, they’d tip them out of the coffin. There was groundwater in the graves, so the dead had to be trodden on so as many as possible would fit. And people were buried [in the Bohušovice Basin] for a long time, before the crematory was built. Afterwards the burnt the bodies in the crematory and put the ashes in paper urns. When the International Red Cross was to visit, they emptied out the ashes into the Ohře River. The urns didn’t just contain the ashes of Jews, they also took dead Czechs from the Small Fortress to be cremated there. An SS man would come from the Small Fortress with a dead body in a paper bag, with blood often seeping through. It had to be burnt immediately under the SS man’s supervision, so that no one would see who was in the bag. They also took women there. And those ashes were mixed in with that of the Jews. So you could have an urn marked with name of Abeles, for instance, but it would also contain the ashes of another dead person from Small Fortress - those were unnamed.”
Eliška Homolková was born on 21 February 1926 into a Czech-Jewish family in Prague. She lived with her parents and older brother in Rakovník, where her father had a business selling construction materials. The family was respected in the town, but Eliška’s carefree life experienced was disrupted by the increasing oppression post-1939, when the first bans and decrees affecting Jews came into force. Her mother had to sew yellow stars on to the coats of her son and daughter. They were not allowed to travel by train. They were forbidden from leaving Rakovník without permission. They were not allowed to talk with anyone, not even their best friends. In 1942, when Eliška was fifteen, the family received a deportation summons. The family was taken to Terezín and split up. Eliška stayed with her mother. She did farm labour while in the ghetto and herded cattle from the razed villages of Lidice and Ležáky. Her memories of the ghetto paint a picture of ever-present death, filth, hunger, fear of deportation, and extreme degradation. She and her mother and father survived the war in Terezín. Her brother was deported to Auschwitz but came home alive. When they returned to Rakovník, they found their home stripped bare bar for a few pieces of furniture. But as Eliška Homolková remembers, the most precious thing for them was that they all came home again. Other Jewish families in Rakovník were much less fortunate... Eliška Homolková died in 2016.
