Bohumil Kos

“An interesting thing was that there was a train waiting at Masaryk Station, and when we were boarding it, there was some organisation there that threw us bread, or dumplings - simply, food. They did that for every transport. The Gestapo wasn’t there any more, it was guarded by German gendarmes. They did try to stop it, but they didn’t chase the people or arrest them. [...] I never noticed anything having been written about this. It made us happy, we were as famished as wolves. It did us good, and we saw that there was someone who cared for us.”

“One time the SS came up with the idea to organise a fighting match between two Jews. They gave them staves, and the Jews had to beat at each other until one of them died. The kapo was charged with making sure they carried on right to the end. Then they had to build a bier, and the Jews had to carry the dead man to Terezín. [Q: Did you have to watch that?] We had to be there for the fight, it was during lunch break. That’s how they treated Jews.”

“[The leader of the resistance group] told me that we have to sabotage production as well. It was up to him to drop something, even though it was supposed to be repaired. Or another thing we did was, even though a product was finished, we pretended to keep on working at it. [...] We did some shoddy pieces, but in such way so as not to attract notice. Otherwise they’d catch us straight away, and perhaps they’d have beaten us into admitting we were sabotaging and that we were organised somehow. [The leader] told me we needed weapons. I promised him I’d try [to get some]. My brother and I had a shotgun and a revolver, which we had hid in a barn at the outset of the war. I think that there were guns in about five or six houses in the village. They were poachers, and I hadn’t heard of them handing in their rifles.”

“Of course I could see he was arrested, so there was no point in denying it. My mate also told me not to deny it, because he had been there at the time. I nodded and that was that. I saved him like that. If they’d have bashed me up a bit more, I might have told on one man from Prague 9, because he seemed a bit... He had a limp. I didn’t know who to tell them about when I suspected that they only had one of them. I didn’t mention anyone else of course, I wouldn’t start telling who all I’d met when they were contented to have the one.”