Otto Taussig

“The people who lived in the house were called Sonnenschein, and their son was chosen for the same transport as I was. And his parents asked my Dad for me to take care of him. He was a year younger than me, but he was kind immature still. I must say that I was a bit more weathered, one thing was that I did sports - I would go play football in Hagibor, I took classes. Whereas he, seeing as he couldn’t go to school, he didn’t do anything. And we kept together and in the end they took us to Germany together, we escaped together and got all the way to Prague. And we were friends our whole life, before he came down with palsy and died. We stayed friends even after each of us married, simply, it was a friendship for life.”

“And in Toužim we walked in the night, and I was cold because I only had a shirt and clogs. And the food, we begged for it three or four times at some lonely houses, when we saw that the house stood all alone. We watched for a long time to see if there was a bloke in the house, or only a woman. And when there was only a woman, we went to beg. They gave us bread, potatoes, so we ate something at least, but not much. And when we were in Toužim, we slept in one hayloft. It was part of a house, it served as a barn, and there was hay in that part. In the morning we heard three or four blokes saying that Hitler had copped it. So we climbed out, but the blokes told us that it’s not over yet, that we should better hide back inside the hayloft, that someone would come to get us in the night. And really, a bloke came for us in the night and took us to Pilsen.”

“All I remember is that [the SA members] went wild there. They broke all of our windows, and we couldn’t even close the front door when they left, and they arrested my father and took him to Sachsenhausen.”