Lubor Zoufal

“They still talked to me in a friendly way, in Czech. They even asked: ´And what does your father do?´ I replied that he was a police officer. They seemed happy about that, they nodded their heads. When we entered that Petschek Palace, three SSmen were standing guard at the entrance. They presented arms in greeting to them, and they shoved me into the door and pushed me from the back. As soon as we stepped over the threshold, they began speaking to me only in German, they stopped speaking Czech.”

“While in Leipzig, we also experienced an air raid, aimed right at the prison. In the same way as we had done it in Dresden, we tore away the heating, we broke the door open with it and I tried to get into the food store. There, I managed to grab two packets of margarine. I had long trousers, and so I stuffed the packets into my stockings. Meanwhile, the air raid was over, and they were now searching those who tried to steal food from that storage room. During the war, in Germany, whoever tried to steal during an air raid, was automatically sentenced to death, so if they found something on a person, that person was executed immediately. And I was so lucky that I had pulled my trousers from my stockings, and the margarine packets thus fell out. So I passed the examination, and they did not find anything on me.”

“There was one prisoner who absolutely did not understand the situation we were in… He was detained based on an anonymous denouncement that he was distilling spirits illegally. Then it was found out that he merely had wine made of fermented bread at home. So in about for days he was released. And on the day when he was to go home, he was given a small loaf of bread for breakfast, as usual, and it was a common practice that when someone was released, he would always leave this bread for his fellow inmates, to help them out. And this guy said: ´Friends, don’t be mad at me, but I can’t give you this bread. I’m taking a tram home all the way to the Vysočany neighbourhood, it’s far, I would get hungry on the way.”

“While in school, I was giving tutoring classes in math and Latin. And I had the opportunity to teach one girl, who was from a half-Jewish family. Her father was a Jew, her mother was a Czech. I taught math and Latin to this girl, preparing her for the school-leaving exam. About a year later I met her in some English course, at a language school, and at that time the girl was already wearing a yellow star of David and she was shunning people. I was quite shocked by that.”