Robert Utikal

"Always our lieutenant colonel, our company commander... so when I was on patrol, as a desk officer, as a supervisor, I always had to say, Comrade lieutenant colonel, nothing special happened during my service. The interesting thing was... and when we got it wrong, we had to say everything exactly, march exactly, and as soon as we made a mistake, he'd yell at us, he was like quite a cruel man, the commander, and the interesting thing was, when it was after November, in December, in January, we had to say sir, not comrade, and as we had experienced comrade, so of course he scolded us again, that we said comrade, and not Mr. Lieutenant Colonel..."

"My mother, being well-raised, greeted them when she saw them. And the guards made fun of her, saying that why is she greeting, that these are not the people... that she is supposed to greet, that this is the waste of humanity, they forbade her to greet them and she had to walk on the other side so that she wouldn't meet them. So I guess that's how she saw the conditions there. What else I remember from what her father told me, who worked right there in those mines and saw the conditions in those camps, was that in the winter, for example, if there were 20-degree frosts and somebody wanted to escape, they had to stand in cold water, in the winter they had them stand there barefoot for maybe an hour... So my mother saw these inhuman conditions with her own eyes, so she saw very well what was happening there..."