Q: “Did you know where you were going there in the east?” “Parents knew about it. My father told me later. We found out only after getting on the train heading east. There were writings ‘Auschwitz’ and an exclamation mark after that. We knew what Auschwitz was but we didn’t know about the extermination camps and gas chambers. And I don’t now if my parents knew. I never asked my father and never had the chance to ask my mother. We came there after a journey which lasted about three days. And when we came there they were shouting at us that we have to leave everything in the train. I didn’t do as they said and took my bag with me. And because they were shouting all the time I went back and threw the bag back in the train. And that was a good decision because I had a Russian textbook in the bag… Because after the Munich treaty, we didn’t trust the West so much, so the East was our hope.”
“There were beds for six people. The thing was that thirty of us had to sleep on one bed. So when one of us wanted to turn to the other side we all had to turn. Right behind the house there was an electrified fence. There was a young Polish girl, she didn’t belong to us, who gave birth to a baby. And they crushed the baby’s head right before her eyes. And she was so desperate that she jumped, as we called it, on the wires. And that meant instant death because the electricity was really strong.”
Q: “Did you believe that the war will end and you will get out of there or you didn’t have any hopes?” “For a few days I was very pessimistic. One could just become sick or eat that food for a longer time – it was just a watery soup and a tiny piece of bread – you can’t survive on that for long. But I wasn’t there very long. I don’t how people who were there for longer time could survive.” “And after that, what was your attitude towards Germans?” “At first it was very negative. But then I met more people, Germans who were often visiting. Once I also visited them somewhere near Berlin. I just thought that it matters how people live and not how they were born. And this has proved true several times in my life.” “And did you know about the mass expulsions of Germans? What did you think about that?” “I didn’t like it very much, to be honest. Innocent and guilty people were just put in the same box. I didn’t approve that they were treated the same way we were: If you are German you are bad.”
“My sister and my mother walked hand in hand. My sister was fifteen and my mother was dressed in black – they walked about ten steps in front of me and they came to the officer, probably Mengele, and he sent them to the wrong side. And that was it. I never saw them again. There were some people I knew from Theresienstadt – some girls who served as messengers. I asked them what happened to them and they said: ‘What do you think happened to them? They were blown out through the chimney.’ And they meant the crematorium chimney.”
“I didn’t experience anything like that. Once, it was on 15th April 1939, one of my schoolmates came to school and said: ‘We had to hold our father back. Otherwise he would beat the Jew in the tobacco store. Jews are to blame for everything…’ I didn’t know how to react to that. So I bought a pack of candies and decided to give a candy to everyone except for her. But it didn’t work in the end because when she saw the candies she said she didn’t eat that. And that was it.”
“I sometimes ask myself: How could such a civilized nation as Germany do something like that? I do not know how many Germans really knew about that. I’m not sure because later on, when we were in the North Moravia in the labor camp, we told it to the foreman. He was an older man. All the young ones were fighting at the front. He was walking back and forth for half and hour and kept on saying: ‘That is not possible. I can’t believe that.’ So I’m not sure how many Germans knew but I think that the common people didn’t know it.”
MUDr. Eva Vaňousová, born Neumannová, was born on 8th October 1926 in Prague into a Jewish family. Shortly before the war her parents let Eva and her sister Jiřina be baptized because they thought it would save them from Nazi persecution. They also wanted to send their daughters to England (they probably heard about the transports of Sir Nicholas Winton). Eva Vaňousová was not allowed to finish her grammar school studies due to her Jewish origin and for some time followed with private studies, as many other Jewish children did. In 1943, the whole family was sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto. She spent about a year there and on the day of her 18th birthday, was transported to the extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, following her father. Her mother and sister were selected to gas chambers right after the arrival to the camp. Eva spent a few weeks in Auschwitz and then sent to a labor camp in Merzdorf in North Moravia. She didn’t know anything about her father and she thought that he didn’t survive Auschwitz. They met after the war. Despite his congenital cardiac disorder her father survived one of the death marches. Somewhere in Germany two women took care of him and he fully recovered. After the war Eva Vaňousová finished her grammar school studies and got a degree in medicine. She worked the whole life as an internist.
