Ing. Ivana Sládková

"Most of the Czechs who were in the camp were musicians. Those SS men, when they were celebrating something, they would take the camp band in quotation marks to the party and the prisoners would play for them. And this was after Stalingrad. My daddy still said that they always announced from those loud speakers how they were winning on all fronts and how the Germans were rolling the whole world. Now the SS party was after the fighting at Stalingrad, and now the SS men, after they had a little drink, they started to talk, and they were talking about the battle of Stalingrad, how they got beat. And some of the prisoners and the members of the camp band were Viennese Czechs, so they understood German very well, and they understood from the SS men's speech here that they had lost at Stalingrad. And they said that this was such a terribly important information for them because they were locked up, they didn't know for how long, they didn't know what was going to happen to them next. Because the Germans, otherwise, they kept saying they'd be there forever. And if you don't have hope and you don't know that it's going to end one day, then of course it's harder to bear everything. So they immediately spread the word all over the camp to give hope to all those prisoners, to give them a little encouragement. So it seems to me that this was the important thing here, to have some hope and to know that it's not all as these Germans say, but that there is some kind of hope."

"This is the attitude of the citizens of Mauthausen, of course I don't want to lump everyone together, obviously not all of them. But they were bothered by the torture of prisoners, now they are bothered by the visits to Mauthausen. They behave as if the camp had never been there. All of us who have been going there for many years have the impression that the camp is becoming some kind of convalescent home. It's like the Austrians want to turn it into a convalescent home. Because, for example, all the equipment of those camps, there was one row of those barracks left, where the prisoners were housed, and they used to have beds in them. You could see what the barracks looked like. There were even panels with photographs of life in the camp. And even when my dad and I used to go there regularly every year for these celebrations here, he would always say to us, when we were going through the photographs, that's that bastard Ziereis. Dad was awfully polite, but this just this Ziereis, the camp commander, this was a bitch to him because he was really probably a terrible person. He was describing to us who was in the photographs and where they were and what they were. So these photographs disappeared, the beds, the equipment from the barracks, everything disappeared. The barracks are just empty, there's a wooden floor and nothing else. And even the management of that camp banned it from the quarry. The stone quarry is connected with the Mauthausen camp because most of those prisoners from that camp worked in that stone quarry and it was a terrible job. And they didn't allow people to enter that quarry, they didn't even allow people to go there at their own risk. I went there, of course, I got there by the back way, because I was a little bit more familiar with that camp and the surroundings. I went there to light a candle in the quarry. By that time my father was no longer alive, my husband and I were there alone. I went up the stairs. It's very interesting to go up those stairs. Because the prisoners in Mauthausen had clogs, slippers that were just covered with cloth. Here, in these clogs that didn't bend, they were actually hard, they walked on the stones, on the path, to the quarry. They walked down those hundred and eighty-six steps and then back up again. Or if they were taking out stones or taking out latrines or soup kettles, they walked more often. So it was a big problem to walk up those stairs in those clogs. It was interesting to walk in normal shoes on the path that these prisoners had to walk in those clogs, that one at least realized how problematic it was. So the Austrians didn't want to let us in. As I said, I went to the quarry to light a candle. I was actually going back through the barrier, beyond which one was not allowed, and those who were guarding the barrier had pistols. And imagine, when I approached the barrier, they were normally reaching for the pistols. So I thought, I was kind of sad about that. So I said to him, 'Are you going to shoot me now, or what are you going to do to me?' That I dared to go and light a candle in that quarry. So I was sad about it, and I'm still sad about it - and I don't like to participate in liberation celebrations anymore, to tell you the truth, because it becomes something completely different from liberation celebrations, and I think that all the prisoners who were in that camp, if they saw that, would be very sad about it."

"The Gestapo turned off the lights and they all sat in the kitchen waiting to see if Grandpa Emil would come back. Then the doorbell rang and the older son Dalibor returned, and they sat him down in the kitchen as well and waited to see if Grandpa Emil would return. Grandpa Emil did not return. Apparently, they got tired of it and started to question Dad, Grandma and Dalibor. They asked where Grandpa Emil was. They didn't know, of course. And then they took my father and grandmother Kamila to the gendarmerie station in Ivančice, and they started to interrogate Dalibor in the house and, of course, beat him and find out what he knew and with whom grandfather Emil was cooperating, because Dalibor was a liaison of the National Defence. In the end, they brought the beaten Dalibor to the gendarmerie station and took them all together in two cars to Brno, to the law faculty, where the Gestapo headquarters was. In the meantime, they managed to take out some delicacies from the pantry my grandmother had in her house, which one Gestapo man took home on the way. And then they arrived at the law school, where the interrogations began, as my grandmother describes in her memoirs. In one room they were beating and trying to get something out of my grandmother. And in the other room they beat her sons. Grandma heard it all. She heard through the door. She swore she wouldn't say anything, she wouldn't say anything. She describes it as if she had been in the same room with them and had seen them beating her sons, she would certainly have told everything, but she hoped that she and her sons would have stuck it out and not said anything. The interrogations must have been very rough because the grandmother was beaten so badly that she had to be taken to the infirmary and the doctor had to treat her. Then they took turns driving them to the law school for interrogations. They were all imprisoned in Kounice's dormitory. My grandmother describes how, during one of the interrogations, she met Trumpes in the corridor of the law faculty, or she saw Trumpes sitting there, one of Emil's associates, who pretended that he didn't know her, of course. He didn't declare himself to her, and when she was subsequently interrogated, the Gestapo man said to her, 'You will talk and say it the way Trumpes said it.' So my grandmother suspected that a lot was revealed, that a lot was known. She describes a scene where she got sick and asked the SS man who was guarding the place if she could go to the toilet. She went to the toilet, there was a mirror on the wall. And when she looked in the mirror, she saw a completely strange woman, she couldn't recognize herself. She had grey hair, she was beaten up. She couldn't recognize herself."