Erika Juklová

"Both of my parents were practising (orthodox) Jews, I attended a Jewish school, learnt to read Hebrew and I do so even today. Although I am no longer so religious now as I used to be, I observe what I can observe. This is my faith, the faith I was born in. I have nothing against other religions, but I ask them to leave me alone. I do not tell anyone what to believe in, but I want to keep my faith. This is the freedom, let everyone think what they want, but only to a certain extent. I have known one of my friends for fifty-five years, and she is a Catholic. During all these fifty-five years there was not a single evil word between us. I respect her faith, she respects mine. She comes to the synagogue, I go to her church. And there is peace. I wish it were in this way."

"Another ´nice´story. My feet were bleeding. We worked on road construction in severe winter. We did not have any coats or sweaters, nothing like that. We had blankets to cover our bodies with, and some ribbons on our shoulders which we would wrap around ourselves. Our feet became bloody and frostbitten, the same happened to our hands. One day my mother heard some word in Czech or Slovak, and there was a worker doing forced labour. My Mom sang a tune saying that we needed a piece of some cloth. So he threw us a piece of cloth, to bandage my foot with."

"Then we went into some room, where the ´schutzhertling,´or those who have already spent longer time there, were. We had to undress, and they shaved us completely in order to prevent spreading of lice or similar insects. My Mom says: ´Where are you, my girl?´And I was standing right next to her and she could not recognize me. This was terrible. Then they brought us to another room, a bathroom, turned on a shower for one minute, and then gave us some rags for clothing. I got a georgette dress, which was totally transparent, and clogs, and we were made to walk about six kilometres to Birkenau. That was Birkenau B3 and I was placed in camp B5 - together with my Mom and my aunts. There was no place to sit down, only on the floor, we got a piece of bread and a tin cup for water or soup, as they called it. (...) We placed this bread up on a rack, and in the morning it was no longer there. There were many people passing through all the time, so someone stole it."

"With all these neo-Nazi meetings taking place now...I am terribly afraid, the fear is still within me."

"My poor mother had once wrapped her head in a piece of cloth, and this was forbidden, so she was beaten for it. I wanted to get this SS-man who had done it and to assault him. The girls who were standing around held me firmly, otherwise he would have shot me. Such ´wonderful´ things. The worst moment came when I developed some rash. This happened in summer, June or July 1944. I had some eczema on my belly. When they examined us, I had to stand back and try to hide the front of my body, so that they would not send me to the gas chambers. (...) The area where the sick lay was right next to our barracks. Every day, a truck came there; those, who were to be gassed, were loaded naked onto the truck . If they could not get on the truck, they threw them there in blankets. I recognized several of my girlfriends from school there."

"We would walk during the night and suddenly we saw a large meadow in front of us, and the SS-women said that we would sit down here. So we fell asleep in this place, that was in the evening, and in the morning we woke up and the SS-women were all gone. The front was approaching, so they became scared and ran away. They simply left us there..."