“I wore clogs in summer, and in the winter - perhaps that’s what caused the leg problem - I had these longer boots with shoelaces and wooden soles, I don’t quite remember any more; and they did it, the clog couldn’t have, I had it like this around the side, and that’s how I got the blood poisoning, supposedly, I think. And one Maussi Hermann, who worked in the camp with the Germans, she kept the files, and she sent me to the infirmary when I had this thing with my leg, so she really saved me a lot as well. She’s in Sweden. Or would be, if she’s still... [Q: And how did you get injured? Did you have an open wound...?] I had it full of pus, like this. From a blister! It caused an infection that spread all the way up to the knee. I was delirious, I had a high fever, so I went under the knife. [Q: Did they use anaesthetics?] I think so. But when they wanted to make the cut, they pulled really hard to stretch it out, I screamed like... so I was conscious. Doctor, I don’t know if you heard the name, Milke. There were three doctors there I think, Mrs Fantová’s father was one of them, but I don’t remember him, except for when I saw him here about once. The doctors were saved the most, the odd nurse and the odd patient. I don’t know how many survived from [our] transport.”
“They were sorting us! Left, right... They held their hand out in front of me, and pushed me from behind, and I went with the group which, well, they were gassed, my whole transport was gassed! Five thousand people! I’d contracted phlegmon, that is, my leg was inflamed from the boils, from my shoes. So I was in the hospital there, they called it the Krankenstube, they put me under the knife, so I stayed there until the second transport arrived. Věra Lašovic and the Lašovices, Věra and I knew each other from Terezín, we were in the Kinderheim together, so I was with them afterwards. [Q: And this next transport arrived after your parents died?] The transport was already there. [Q: How did you hear about your parents?] Well, I was with my mum, and my dad was just opposite us. And Mum, she also died in that hospital, I was with her, but she didn’t recognise me, they took me there... so, it’s not a nice memory. It was ugly. Hunger, hunger! [Q: And you worked there as well?] No. We caught lice. (laughter) [Q: And did you feel that they behaved differently to you because you were so young?] No, not at all, it didn’t work like that! You came for the roll call, you stood there until they counted you, say for two hours...”
“We were from a February transport in forty-two, and I was there a whole year, and the second year, in September forty-three, we went... And because I was constantly down with tonsillitis, and our doctor always excused me from the transport, so then we didn’t want that any more, so we went. Well, we were there for at least a year. Mum worked for the gendarmes at one point, peeling potatoes, she worked outside the ghetto, simply, for our gendarmes, who were there. [Q: How were you treated by the Terezín kapos?] They emptied out the whole of Terezín afterwards. We didn’t really come across them much. As I say, compared to all that went on there, it was... We were accommodated in barracks, in Terezín. Dad was elsewhere, he was in Magdeburg, and we were in Podmokly, the women were. [Q: But you could meet somewhere perhaps...] Yeah, only to begin with, only in the groups and only on Sundays you could join a group, they marched you somewhere... We also had our grandmother there. She died as well. [Q: And whose mother was that?] My mum’s mum.”
“I worked [in various places] in Germany: Dienstadt, Neuengamme, and I don’t know where else, Hamburg as well. [Q: What did you do there?] Well, in Germany they had us pull bricks out, say, because it had been bombed, or I loaded up sand from the quarry into those mine carts... Mostly that. And then we were in whatsit... We made cement boards there, with iron. Loading the sand up into the carts was worse. [Q: You had to work every day?] Every day. [How many hours?] Well, eight. [Q: They treated you a bit better?] We were supervised there, we called him the Little Marine, this one little marine gramps, he supervised us, he was there with us. So they took us away again... [Q: And you were all girls there?] All women. [Q: But you were probably exceptionally young...] There was one younger girl there, by about a year. From Prague. One Věra Lašovic. I was with them in Auschwitz too. She’s in America. She left here. She married, went to Israel, I don’t know for how long, and then she ran away to America. [Q: So she wrote to you from there as well?] She didn’t write, but she had her mother, sister here, her sister’s still alive... [Q: So you know this from them. Are you still in touch?] Not any more. I don’t go there, haven’t for a long time. I did to begin with, but nowadays I wouldn’t go there for the world, not to Prague I wouldn’t.”
“We were in the Familienlager, which was for the men and women, the families from Terezín. And they were all gassed. A few of us survived in the hospital. Perhaps ten, fifteen... 60178 [pointing to a number tattooed onto her forearm], and the others, they did it over here, they numbered them here. Just our one had it here [on the outer side of the forearm]. Well, it’s a miracle I came back, truly a miracle, there’s no other way... Because if I had been, I don’t know if it was the same one, the dunces started bombing it, right into the prison camp, we were in this one tiny bunker there, just a few of us... I don’t know, ten... A bomb landed just as far as it is from here to the hallway. Right in front of where we lived. Well, it didn’t explode. If it had exploded, that would’ve been the end. And... it was awful, it was one thing after another.”
“[Q: What do you remember about your liberation?] Well, I was already in Bergen-Belsen. It was in April, I think. [Q: And what happened?] We were wired in, right, and then off they went, and to prevent escaping, because they had to dress us up somehow... [Q: And the Germans weren’t there any more, were they?] They legged it. Well, off they went, you know, of course. I know that when they brought, I don’t know, I think they said it was Mengele, they brought him... But I can’t look at it. I can’t even... Well, I tell you, just a moment more and that’s it. It was dreadful there. They said we’d been given poisoned bread... whether that’s true or not... One last thing we had to do was carry leather coats, those warm ones, to the train station. Some five coats tied together, and you had to carry it to the station. By the time we got there, we didn’t have any of them. We threw them away. You couldn’t carry that! [Q: And what happened when you didn’t bring any?] We carried them in the night. [Q: But you didn’t bring any. They didn’t punish you for that?] No. The place was ablaze, that’s why we had to carry it... [Q: And you went back there?] Of course. [Q: And how far was it, roughly?] You must realise that we went in the night. Do you think I could see anything? All we did was steal a beetroot and eat it. A raw beetroot.”
Hana K. was born on 26 January 1930 in Unhošť. She grew up in the family of an assimilated Jewish businessman who owned the Unhošť distillery and bakery, among others. On 26 February 1942 Hand and her parents, grandmother, and other relatives were deported from Kladno to Terezín in Transport Z. The family was kept there until the end of summer 1943. On 6 September 1943 she and her parents (her grandmother died in Terezín) were placed on Transport Dm to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was assigned with another 250 children up to 15 years of age to the children’s block of the Terezín Familienlager in Section BIIb. In November of that year Hana’s mother died in the Auschwitz hospital, in January 1944 her father - more than ten years older than her mother - also passed away. On the fateful night from 8 to 9 March 1944, when 3,700 Czech and Slovak Jews were murdered in the Auschwitz gas chambers, Hana was struggling with fever in the camp infirmary. She had been accepted there thanks to Maus Hermann and a severe case of leg phlegmon, caused by ill-fitting shoes. The inflammation spread up to her knee, and the need for amputation was becoming imminent, but timely surgical treatment saved her leg. After recovering, Hana was taken with several other women to work in Germany. She cleared rubble or loaded sand in the bomb-destroyed streets of Hamburg, in another labour camp she made cement boards. She and her fellow female prisoners were evacuated from a besieged Hannover to the concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen, where she survived the horrific conditions of the last eight days preceding the camp’s liberation by the British army. She dragged the heavy leather coats of the German soldiers from a burning Bergen-Belsen to the train station. She and the other inmates were taken to Zielebach, and in June 1945 through the help of a friend’s fiancé, she boarded a bus to Prague and then to her native Unhošť. She was the only survivor of her extensive Jewish family. After the war she finished her school, took up a job, later founded a family, and brought up two sons. She passed away on 3 August 2024.
