Jan Zavřel

“The last days of the camp were horrible. They wanted to get rid of witnesses, and they began to burn people. Many people from other camps arrived to this camp. All of them were mixed together. Raja Tobišková came there from Ravensbrück. There were people who arrived from Auschwitz, Simon Wiesenthal was also there.”

“They started with a pogrom against the Czechs in Mauthausen. Every night it was like this: 'Czechs, Roll call!´ We all had to go to the apelplatz. They were threatening us with stock-whips and the sick also had to be carried in. There was nothing we could do. Everyone wanted to get as far away from that stock-whip as possible. They were giving us Czechs hell; that was after Heydrich assumed power. After his assassination, it was the same: 'Czechs, roll call!´ And again, they put the Czechs through hell. It happened twice. It was actually worse when Heydrich had taken control over Bohemia than after he was assassinated.”

“I couldn’t do it. I had some books there. Not only this, but also manuals for calculating concrete structures, how to calculate the reinforcement. It was all written there, but I didn’t understand it. I remember that there was a bridge. Not too big, some fifty metres long, and it was made of reinforced concrete. I used the charts to calculate the factors involved and everything. I received reinforcements for it and I didn’t know how to use them. I recieved some 25 of them, thirty metres long, and I didn’t know where I was to place them. Whether something was a metre, for instance, I had no idea.

“The Americans arrived there on the fifth, on Saturday. The SS men left on Tuesday.” Interviewer: “So from Tuesday you were already free.” – “No, we were not free. The SS men were replaced by policemen from Vienna, about a thousand of them. They took over the camp. We had to laugh because the commander issued a pamphlet when he learnt that we had suffered from hunger there. But we could already go out and go wherever we wanted. The thousand policemen were waiting for the Americans just like we did.”