“I was in prison in Ebrach. In Ebrach, you could already hear the gunfire thundering from the front lines. They transported us back to Straubing. All the inmates from Ebrach were transferred to Straubing. Straubing prison had a capacity of approx. 2000 prisoners and it was getting crowded as there were around 4000 inmates squeezed in the prison cells. One day, I think it was on April 24th or something around that date, they got us lined up on the prison yard. We were given a blanket, a tin pot and a spoon, and we set out on a march. Luckily, I was somehow able to get a second blanket for me. They took us out of the prison through the main gate and we marched on Dachau. For the first two days, there was a tractor loaded with bread accompanying us. It was driven by an inmate who was guarded by an SS-man. But then it allegedly broke down and for the remainder of the march, we were left with no food or water. This lasted for four days after which most of the inmates died. Only about 1200 made it to the Altfrauenhofen village out of 4000 inmates who were on that march originally. Those who didn’t make it were left dead on the road. They shot everybody who couldn’t go on anymore.”
“An SS-man came and pushed me inside that Mercedes. We then drove to the Gestapo police directorate. They pushed me inside one of the offices. A man was sitting there at his desk and he asked me in Czech if my name was Veselý. I said yes and he told me that they are suspecting me of being involved in activities against the state. He also said that they would have to verify this and so on and so on. He also told me to only say the truth and hide nothing from him. He was very kind to me at first. He took a couple of pictures from his drawer and handed them over to me. ‘Do you know this man?’. I said no. He showed me a couple of other pictures and asked me the same question. After I responded in the negative for the next few times, he didn’t like it anymore. He called out loud: ‘Hans, komm hier!‘ The door opened and a guy came in. He bent me over a chair and tied my hands to my feel. He then beat me up with a cane. They kept asking me and whenever I said 'No' or ‘I don’t know’, he would give me a blow. I couldn’t sit for at least a week afterwards and I had bloody stripes all over my back. I think that I was twice or maybe three times at this interrogation.”
“On some of the fields, there was fodder beet and once some twenty or so inmates would throw themselves on the beet. The SS-guards immediately shot all of them and you could see the dead or dying inmates still biting on the beet. It was a gruesome scene to see them lying there in this way.”
“They lined us up on the apelplatz on that yard. We were about two hundred. One SS-man was going through the lines and he stopped at one young guy from Litomyšl. He pointed at him and said: ‘You’re a Jew!’. The inmate replied: ‘No, I’m a Christian’. The SS-man said again: ‘You’re a Jew!’. ‘No, I’m a Christian’. He pulled his gun and shot him. That was the first demonstration of power in Theresienstadt. They wanted to show us who was running the place. We were meant to understand immediately that they could do anything they liked to us. The prisoners meant nothing there, they had absolutely no value there.”
“We distributed hundreds of leaflets, maybe thousands. I confessed that I had gotten one leaflet from Pepík Bíca and that I gave it back to him since I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. And then I also confessed that I had gotten another one that I used as toilet paper. I didn’t tell them anything else. Of course, they didn’t want to believe me. But that’s all I confessed and they couldn’t prove that I didn’t tell him the truth. For those two leaflets, I was sent to five years to prison. Of those 42 people, I think that just twelve came back. The others were executed.”
“We arrived in Pardubice at four o’clock in the morning. The train stopped at the fifth platform and between the exit and the fifth platform, there was a freight train standing. That was still at a time when the Pardubice train station didn’t have pedestrian subways. My leg was swollen all the way up to my knee. I was all in pain and could hardly walk. That Lanštofl was pretty much in the same condition. When we stopped, most of the people went to the back of the train and then crossed the tracks to the exit. He said he’d crawl underneath the train. I told him not to be foolish and to take the same way as the other passengers. But he wouldn’t listen to me – he had definitely made up his mind and decided to crawl underneath the train. When I was walking past the end of the train, the locomotive slowly set the train into motion. That Lanštofl, was still underneath the train and before he managed to crawl across the tracks, he… When I came to the exit I saw a stretcher. On the stretcher was a man. It was that Landštofl. Both his legs were crushed just above the ankle. He wasn’t fast enough and the train rolled over him.”
“That Volksgericht in Berlin, that was a horrific place. I was on the fourth floor and the death row was located one story below. The inmates from the death row were waiting for death on their prison cells. The evenings there were really driving me mad. One would cry, another would pray, the third one would laugh, the fourth begged for his mother, the fifth was singing and so it went. The people waiting for their execution were getting nuts.”
Karel Veselý was born in 1922 in Heřmanův Městec. During the war, he worked in the Flugzeugwerke Chotzen (Choceň) aircraft factory that belonged to Ing. Jaroslav Mráz. In Choceň, he joined a local resistance group and together with his friend Ludvík Kodýtko they distributed leaflets throughout the city. In April 1942, he was arrested and ensuingly subjected to a number of very brutal interrogations by the Gestapo in Pardubice. After the interrogations, he was imprisoned in the little fortress of the Theresianstadt ghetto and later in prisons in Bautzen (Budyšín), Dresden, and Berlin. He was sentenced to five years and was jailed in prisons in Straubing and Ebrach. In April 1945, he was sent on a so-called “death march” to the Dachau concentration camp. Most of the prisoners who took part in this march perished. Of the four thousand that went on the march, only 1200 survived. The others were shot, beaten to death or died of starvation or complete exhaustion. After the war, he at first lived at home in Pardubice and later in Nové Sedlo. He eventually settled in Šumperk, where he still lives today.
