“I have passed through the selections. It was terrible. I had to say that I was nineteen or twenty, because otherwise I would have been sent through the chimney. Once an SS man looked at me and asked me how old I was. I said twenty. He laughed and shook his head. Otherwise I would have ended in a gas chamber, because they didn’t need people like that. Those who were crookbacked, or without a limb, perhaps after some surgery, and it was visible, they all ended in gas chambers. They didn’t need people like that. And people with glasses. Mainly people who wore glasses. They were all gassed.”
“My mom remained in Terezín; she worked there as a nurse for the handicapped. There was a barrack with a fence around it and the nurses were going there in shifts in the mornings, afternoons and nights. My mom was working there and she was taking care of them. The handicapped were then transported away and the barracks were evacuated completely, including the staff. They were all gassed, the patients as well as the staff. I learnt this later, because I inquired about it. I asked whether they knew about my mom and what had happened to her. They just wrote me that she had been gassed together with other prisoners in 1944.”
“In 1953 I was sentenced in the name of the Republic to half a year for re-education by the communists. Since I had been interned for three years before, the People’s Court in Čáslav sentenced me to half a year of re-education.”
“My mom was without documents, and I was a student without documents as well. They made a phone call from Kolín to the presbytery in Krchleby where I was born. The idiot there told them that I was without religion. I had received my confirmation as a Catholic in Ronov. A transport was dispatched the flowing day and they put us there and I and mom thus found ourselves in Terezín. My mom was not Jewish, but she had no way to prove it. She didn’t have any documents and neither did I.”
Jaroslav Žatečka was born May 4, 1928 in Krchleby near Čáslav. His mother Anna Žatečková came from a Czech family who lived in the USA and she moved back to Czechoslovakia in the 1920s. Jaroslav spent his childhood in Třemošnice where his unmarried mother worked in a factory which produced gas masks. During a document check which was conducted in the factory after the assassination of Heydrich, she failed to provide documents which she had not requested when she had returned to her homeland. Anna Žatečková and her fourteen-year-old son Jaroslav were therefore summoned to the Gestapo in Kolín. Since they were unable to prove that they were not Jews, they were included in the third transport of Jews from Kolín to the ghetto in Terezín on June 13, 1942. Jaroslav Žatečka stayed in the children’s home L417 and did various jobs. On September 28, 1944 he was transported to Auschwitz and his mother followed him on October 6, 1944. She died in Auschwitz. Jaroslav Žatečka passed the selection process and after a short time he was taken from Auschwitz to the labour camp Kaufering in Bavaria, where he was liberated by the American army in April 1945. After rehabilitation in the spa town Baden-Baden he returned to Czechoslovakia in July 1945. After completing his studies and his military service he started a family. In 1953 he was sentenced to half a year of imprisonment for alleged dissemination of news from the West. He served his sentence in the prison in Prague-Pankrác, but amnesty was declared two months later and he was able to return home. Jaroslav Žatečka lived in Třemošnice near Čáslav. He passed away on October, the 5th, 2022.
