Stanislava Šprincová

“I was taken at night. The prison cell was crowded and people had to step over each other. A baby was crying, and the stench was horrible. I didn’t get any sleep in this transport cell. Then they made us stand on the ramp and began calling out our names. At first I didn’t realize it when they called Kófan Stanislaus. That was actually Kavan Stanislava. Only when they repeated it two or three times did I raise my hand. There were more of us and we had to get into a prison van and they were driving us all over Vienna and taking us to the individual prisons. Vienna had been bombed before and the van was bouncing on the cobbled streets. I haven’t eaten any breakfast and I felt sick. I nearly fainted. I was the last one. They took me to the third district, to the Jugendhaftanstalt in Rüdengasse. That was a special prison for juveniles. They led me to a cell and I asked the woman who was the director of the prison: ´Please, give me something to eat.´ - ´There is nothing left.´ I haven’t eaten anything for the whole day. I was half dead. At first I was placed in a cell for foreign inmates and after some of them had been released, they merged them into one. As the bombardment was getting more intense, there were no new inmates coming and they merged the both cells, the German one and the foreign one, into one.”

“The bombardment was getting more and more frequent. It was horrible. When we heard a cuckoo sound that was the signal that bombing aircraft were approaching. Those were the American flying fortresses. They led us down to the basement. They led the German girls to the basement, but we, foreigners, were hiding only under the staircase. After a while we heard a whirring sound which then changed into a roar and this was accompanied with the barking of the flak cannons. When the flak fell silent, that was the worst moment, because it meant that the anti-aircraft defence personnel went to hide in the shelter and the planes were now overhead. Then we heard the thundering of the bombs and sometimes we could hear the bricks and building material collapsing over our heads. Then everything became quiet. But they came again. After a while the whir was heard again and then the roaring and then the thundering bombardment began.”

“We received a telegram, which took five days to arrive, that Antonín Kavan was bedridden in the quarantine station in Roudnice nad Labem suffering from typhoid fever. There were no regular trains operating at that time. The railway tracks, bridges, and trains had been damaged. The Railways’ headquarters dispatched a bus from here to Terezín and my mother and I used the opportunity and travelled to Roudnice nad Labem. There we went the International Red Cross and we learnt from them that Antonín Kavan had died that night due to typhoid fever. That was a terrible blow.”

“I heard a cry: ´The synagogue is on fire!´ I went there to take a look. Awful smoke was coming out of it and there were guards around. What was interesting was that it was the Czech fascists who were watching it and preventing the firefighters from putting down the fire. I even saw one boy there who attended the Slavic grammar school and who had even been a Boy Scout before. The synagogue thus kept burning, because they have not allowed them to put the fire down.”

“It was very difficult for me to endure that stupid political regime. Can you imagine what stupid things we had to put up with at the university? Or take the elections under the totalitarian system: here is the ballot box, here is the only unified ballot paper and you just put it in there. There was no secret ballot or free decision-making… As teachers we had to tell the students that the socialist elections were a wonderful benefit. Or we had to make them march in the May Day parades. It goes without saying that they justly objected against it. But we had to report that our students did participate in the parade. What I did was that I turned to my academic assistants who were students working for us and ordered them: ´Listen now, you go and join that parade. I got to report the people who will go that and I want to report that my students have participated.´ My assistants went there just for my sake. We had to come to the assembly place. ´Here, take the flowers and banners and you got to wave as you pass by the stands and shout hooray.´ The professors and academics from the university were there.”