“Roll call on 8 April, they chose five thousand prisoners and put them on wagons to Weimar. They crammed us prisoners a hundred at a time into one open cargo wagon. They still had some leftover coal or dirt at the bottom. We went from Buchenwald to Weimar. They evacuated us away from the encroaching Western army to Flossenbürg concentration camp. We were there about two weeks, and then came another order, and the evacuation to Dachau. We rode in the wagons for about a day and a half, but they couldn’t go any further because the railroad was bombed up. So we got out and walked - a death transport to Dachau. Lots of the prisoners had died off already in the wagons, so... In the end we were led by just one SS man and one SS woman. They took us through some villages, and in one village there was a crossroads, the transport turned the corner, the guard was some way ahead of us. So we popped into the house, saying we were hungry, so they gave each of us a piece of bread. We rushed out again, but the guard was nowhere to be seen, so I jumped over the wall. I wanted to leg it to one farm there, except the gate was closed, so I had to quickly get back in line, and we marched off towards a forest.”
“There was a ditch in the forest, and there was a heap of logs piled up straight across the ditch. We jumped down under the logs and listened until the last of the prisoners’ footsteps died away. It was quiet, so I reckoned it was okay. Next morning I peered out, and there was a Ruskie hidden away a bit further on. I asked him what we should do. He said to hide in some church and wait until the end of the war. There was one Gypsy who ran away with me. So we discussed what to do. I said we should climb out in the evening, take the road and leave. They were already bombing the area, the western front was already closing in on the Danube. There was cattle running around the field. So we went to the forest, and there was a derelict house just before the start of the village. We came up to the house, and suddenly a German soldier in the ditch, halt! He asked for our identification, and he wanted to know where we were going. The Gypsy spoke good German, so we told him a tall tale. The soldier told us we should go along the road, not across the field, otherwise we’ll look like partisans. The Gypsy told me to ask him for a cigarette. So he gave us a cigarette each. So we strode along the road, there were lots of soldiers waiting it out in all of the houses. We came to the first house, and the lady there had a sewing machine, so she sewed us a Czech flag, which we put on our sleeve, and we continued on down the road, to show that we were foreigners - Czechs.”
“In Buchenwald, every morning, they’d always heap the dead bodies on to a handcart like road workers used to have. Or, I saw them beat someone to death. The worst was in the transports. When we walked to Flossenbürg, as soon as someone stayed behind, exhausted, they shot them in the head. Kicked them down, into the ditch. We were trailed by a group of prisoners who dug the dead bodies into the ditches. We were at the back, and there was one Ostravan with us, he was done for. We told him: ‘Come on, you have to keep going.’ He lingered about five steps behind us, so they shot him. We tried with all our might to quickly get up front rather than to stick around the back. Like I said, of the five thousand of us only two thousand seven hundred reached Flossenbürg.”
Jaroslav Vomočil was born on 28 July 1927 in the village of Desná near Litomyšl. In 1944 the Protectorate authorities summoned him for work at an ammunition plant in Polička, where he helped manufacture mortar shells. In September 1944 he was arrested by the Gestapo. Although he was not a member of any resistance group, the Germans kept him in Nazi prisons and concentration camps without trial until the end of the war. He was held in the Gestapo prison in Pardubice, the Small Fortress in Terezín, and concentration camps Buchenwald and Flossenbürg. In April 1945 he was placed on a death march from Buchenwald to Flossenbürg; of the five thousand prisoners on the march, supposedly only two thousand seven hundred survived. During another death march from Flossenbürg to Dachau, he managed to escape and survive. That occurred near Straubing on 27 April 1945, on Jaroslav Vomočil’s name day. After the war he moved to the formerly German village of Žichlínek (Ger.: Sichelsdorf). Died in 2015.
