There was no envy. No one knew if he would live to see the morning.
The story of Josef Trefný is known only from a donated recording, probably made in 1997. Fragments of information about his life were added on the basis of a search in the archives. He was born in Obecnice in the Příbram district, probably on 26 January 1919, and grew up on the premises of the Bohnice psychiatric hospital where his father Václav Trefný was employed. He worked as a butcher and in the early 1940s married Vítězslava Ryšková, with whom he had a daughter Eva. The couple moved to Ostrava, where Josef Trefný was arrested in 1942 for unknown anti-Nazi activities. In January 1943 he was transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. There he worked in a sand factory and later in the DAW workshop on the production of wooden spoons for the Wehrmacht. In the summer of 1943, he was transported with other Czechs to Buchenwald concentration camp, and also spent some time in the subsidiary camp Aschersleben. His fellow prisoners included later prominent Communist functionaries such as Alexej Čepička and Josef Frank. After the war, he worked as a tram driver and dispatcher. During the fabricated trial of Rudolf Slánský’s group, he organized a petition to save Josef Frank, who had been sentenced to death. After 1989, he was active in an organization of former Auschwitz prisoners.