Karel Suchan

“Mine was a special case, because I stayed in a private house. I escaped and went to my aunt’s in the Czech-Moravian Highlands, and I stayed there for about two weeks, without reporting my place of residence. I didn’t go out to the village much. Nothing was happening, my parents wrote me that nobody had been looking for me, so I went back to Brno and applied for a course at the trade academy. Some men in leather jackets appeared there: ´Wie heissen Sie? Wie alt bist du? Wer ist der… Komm mit.´ The formalities of the arrest were summed up in the ´komm mit´ phrase. When I was in the concentration camp then, I tried to argue that we had schutzhaft – protection custody - but what was meant by this protection custody was just that these Gestapo men said ´komm mit.´ Now the situation in Brno was such that the Gestapo probably overslept somehow, they arrested very few people. Especially from Brno, they did not arrest too many. But I was among them. I went to Špilberk. Over Christmas they took us to Vienna, and it was just perfect there. I remembered from Good Soldier Schweik that there was that chapel, where the chaplain preached, so we even wanted to ask permission to go to that chapel, but they saw through us and did not allow it. But on the tenth, things started getting bad. The commander, some Mr. Czizek, called us and he took off his hat and said: ´Boys, look at my gray hair, I’ve been through a lot, but you are young, you will endure it.´ This was a sign that something bad was in store for us.”

“The concentration camp helped me quite a bit during the communist era. The reason was that in 1945 I declared that I supported socialism, but not the communist version. I support the national socialists, I joined the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party, which was a cardinal sin for the communists. This was one blemish I had. The other reason was that I was not of a working-class descent. My father was a grammar-school principal. He was neither labourer nor shock-worker. Thus, my personal history was very bad, but I have had the experience of being a concentration camp prisoner. Having been a former concentration camp prisoner eventually helped me in 1969. At the time I was to be dismissed from the institute. My name was on the list of those who were to be dismissed, but if they wanted to dismiss political prisoners, they needed to obtain an approval from a local district committee, and this committee’s chairman, Josef Nikl, was a friend of mine. He and I had carried corpses to the crematorium, there had been heaps of them everyday. And this friend was now to dismiss me. After that he told me that he had been to the district committee and told them: ´How can I dismiss Karel Suchan? …I cannot.´ We continued to be friends, and they told him, all right, do as you like. And he placed me in the library and nobody bothered me there.”

“We arrived there in the evening, and our lives wer already at risk. When you were passing through the gate, you were already exhausted, you did not hear what they were shouting at you. I speak German well, but I did not understand him. He was shouting at me to take my hat off when I was passing by a swastika. He grabbed a stick and knocked the hat off my head. Luckily he only hit the hat… Thus I’ve survived the first phase. Then we were going through the entry process. We were standing in a row, and in front of us there was one Jew from Brno. His name was Deutsch. And the SS men got terribly mad that a ´stinky Jew´ could have such a name. For the Deutsch, they were the better race, so they started beating him and I saw that he fell down and was bleeding, and I thought: Now it’s my turn. I came there, but they’ve already spent their rage, so they only put down my name. Then we went into showers, but it was real water, no gas. Then we had to assemble outside, and we stood there right after taking the shower and it was freezing. And suddenly a guy came there, we did not know who he was, and he ordered in Czech: ´Make a line, turn right!´ In the concentration camp, everything was done while moving, running. And he led us to our block. His name was Ivan Sekanina. If you go to Nové Město na Moravě, on the market square you can see his memorial tablet there. He was a wonderful man, he was helping us, the students. And then, while he was helping some Poles, the Germans caught him and in three days he was dead. Such was our entry to the concentration camp.”

“Something happened in the Protectorate at that time. As far as I know, a certain student named Sudek shot a German policeman in Kladno. And we were to feel the repercussions. An SS man came running to us, shouting: ´All Czechs get out!´ I thought nothing could happen to me, for I was sick with scarlet fever, so I stood up and told him that I had scarlet fever. He got so angry because I opposed him. He didn’t care if I had scarlet fever or not, he had said ´all Czechs out!´ and I didn’t leave. So he simply kicked me out, and what was I to do – nothing. But one thing became apparent there: the solidarity, the cooperation among the prisoners. Two prisoners came to me, Germans, I don’t know them, I’ve not seen them before nor after. And they took me and one more boy – a medical student with pleurisy, he was a medical student, he knew it had to be treated –they took us to the hospital through a backdoor, and this way I got out of it.”