“ “This phenomenon is common among people who had been in internment. Immediately after the war, when we had new families and children, and when the times changed, we didn’t talk about what we had been through. It is very difficult to interpret all this. You look at a flood and say, how terrible. But only if you experienced it, you would know what it really is. When you have to pack your things… I have experienced this. Running away from your home and not taking anything. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a flood, but when people were evacuated and they had to sleep in a local gym carrying a bag with their belongings, I thought, ‘How terrible’, and I couldn’t sleep.”
“When they said that Dad went to the lodge, I had this idea when I was a kid that he went to some lodge to take a rest, something like a summerhouse. And since I loved and admired my dad, I was always very happy when he went to take a rest. But this lodge was probably something like the freemasons, because they were secretly elected free-thinking Jewish intellectuals with inclinations to philosophy. So that was the lodge where dad was going.”
“We arrived from Auschwitz; you probably know all this about the transports. There were about two hundred of us standing in the train. We were in one car and we were all standing. I began suffering from fever and quinsy because I used to have problems with abscesses on my tonsils. And the girls were so nice that they let me sit on the floor. Then we arrived and got out of the car in Konzentrationslager Oederan. Well, we were happy that we were out of Auschwitz. Another carriage with Polish women and another one with Hungarian women arrived with us. We saw a factory and factory chimneys and so we thought: We came here to work. But I felt so sick.”
“One day I accidentally sat on a wasp. Mrs. Herzková then told me: ´Stick out your ass and I’ll take the sting out for you.´ There are wall arcades in the Terezín barracks, and from one of them it was possible to see into our room. The following day I was walking in the corridor and a young man stopped me. He tells me: ´I know you.´ – ´But I don’t know you.´ – ´I know that your name is Helena, and I saw your butt yesterday.´ – ´What? What do you mean…?!´ – ´Well, Mrs. Herzková was pulling out the sting for you.´“
“We learnt very soon, perhaps even the same day, that the oberaufseher (overseer woman) had brought her from Auschwitz to work as a Jewish warden for the female prisoners. She had her in the barrack block. Edita turned out to be a melancholic person. She became a close friend to three of us, and therefore after some time she confided to us that her brother had been in the commando which was loading the corpses to the ovens. He saw that he was putting his own mom and daddy to the oven, and he began to panic, and they shot him. After that she became totally withdrawn.”
“If you ask a typical prisoner from that time about how he managed to survive, he has to answer, 'luck and coincidence.' There was nothing else you could do to survive. If you dared to take chances, there was a ninety-nine percent probability that they would shoot you. But taking risks was not seen frequently, because every one of us – although subconsciously –sensed that they would not let us live after what we had witnessed, because we might then tell the world. Therefore we believed that it didn’t matter anymore. But the life there was carpe diem – to enjoy every day. I don’t mean to enjoy it in merriment, but to survive.”
Helena Krouská, née Lamplová, was born in September 1921 in a Jewish family in Znojmo. Her father Josef Lampl was a veterinarian and an important member of the Moravian chapter of B’nai B’rith. In February 1938, her mother, Anna, died of cancer when she was only 42 years old. In the same year, after the German occupation of Austria, most of her closest relatives were living in the German sphere of influence. After the occupation of the Sudetenland, the rest of the family had to move from Znojmo to Moravské Budějovice. Soon after, her sixteen-year-old brother František left for Palestine in a group of children with an emigrant passport. In April 1942, her father Josef committed suicide in a Gestapo office in a hopeless situation after being interrogated. Helena and her grandparents were deported to the Terezín ghetto soon after. While in Terezín she married MUDr. Jiří Ganz. In October 1944, she left with him in a transport for Auschwitz-Birkenau, and shortly after she continued from there to the labour camp Oederan in Sachsen. She returned to Terezín during an evacuation at the beginning of May 1945. Jiří Ganz succumbed to an injury and serious disease in Dachau. After the war, Helena settled in Prague and she married again, to JUDr. Otakar Krouský. Together they are raising two children from his first marriage and their son Jan. The couple maintain close contacts with people who were against the communist regime. She died on March 26, 2024.
