Jan Trégl

“If you found a piece of stale bread, you ate it. The hunger there was terrible, no one can even imagine it. I was so hungry that I couldn’t sleep. The worst of all was the period before you got used to it. It takes some time for the body to start using its own resources, and you feel terrible hunger in the period between. But I endured it...”

“The four of us were sent to Terezín, and we shared one cell there. Actually, we got to know each other there, once we found ourselves together. Otherwise I wouldn’t even know it, because I knew only Knobloch, and I didn’t know about anybody else. When they interrogated me, they showed me a picture of this Knobloch, but I didn’t know him, I have never met him before. And so they sent me to Terezín, I don’t remember anymore whether there was some trial or not, but it was probably so, because they sent me a notice of my detention...”

“The two of them were told to get ready for duty. Karel Lípa thought that he was going home, for he had his wedding scheduled for Saturday, and we had been arrested on Wednesday. Karel told me that when he was interrogated the Gestapo man promised him that he would be home by Saturday for sure. But they were transferred from Terezín, they left, and then at the end of March there came a notice about their deaths. They had been executed: they died in Mauthausen. I had been sentenced to three months, and I was released on 18th March...”

“The end of the war looked like this: May 5th was Saturday, and on May 7th we stopped working in the cooperative. I was riding home on my bike, and on my way I met one policeman whom I knew and asked him where he was going. He said he was on his way to Štěpán to arrest a German garrison there. I wanted to go there with him, but he eventually decided not to go. I was an idiot because I did go there; I got amongst them and told them that the war was over and they asked me why the war was over. Then they asked how they could get away from there, and so I sent them to the Americans... But I went to Štěpán again the day after and it was terrible, the Germans were already there and they were searching and arresting people...”

“A Czech worker gave me a slice of bread one day, but the warden saw it and ordered me to take it out of my pocket. It was just a piece of bread! The warden slapped me so hard over my ear that I have been deaf on that ear ever since. Well, I have survived. There were six of us and I was the only one who returned...”