It was really better for us because when we went to work and got in touch with the world outside, we felt better. That concentration camp was nicely located; there were trees and nature was fragrant. I love flowers and aromatic plants, but I like trees best because I treasure things that last, something that keeps on living. When one comes back, say, in ten years’ time, the trees are still there. It was a very pretty forest. In the evenings the women came to stand outside our hut, only one or two because we were so tired after the hard labor. I remember when I stepped outside, a woman I hadn’t met before was standing there. We weren’t on our own. There were Poles, Czechs, Austrians and Dutch women, but they were moved elsewhere later. This woman stood there and said: “Don’t speak to me; I’m talking to my mother.” So at night we went outside to speak to our parents.
We were there for some time. At first we worked at a brick factory, getting there in a little train. It had only benches to sit on, and it was very cold. In the mornings, there was mist above the forest, and when we went through it, light from the sun got more intense. The mist became colorful, pink and blue – I loved that. Women cursed badly because we got so frozen during the journey. We only had the striped prison garb, no undergarments, and clogs. Some women wore them, but I couldn’t as they would scuff my feet. We were terribly frozen, but I always looked forward to the journey because in that forest I could see various beautiful forms.
In the brick factory we simply unloaded coal. A large wagon arrived with enormous chunks of coal; we got a shovel to unload or load it into another wagon. We threw the heavy coal and felt very weak – it was a terrible situation; women fainted. One day our boss came, a strange person. He was very thin, white hair, white face, wearing a Russian rubashka under a black habit. All the time he shouted and swore – how come we couldn’t use a shovel, what sort of garbage were we? He had paid good money to the camp for us, and we weren’t productive enough.
One day he shouted again, and I became hysterical and told him: “Why do you scream at us? We’re all students here, clever, educated women, and you shout at us; how dare you?” I stood on the heap of coal and screamed at the top of my voice back at him. Women held me by my legs and pleaded: “Stop, you’ll get us into terrible trouble!” He turned around and went away. I thought that he would shoot us on the spot, but he didn’t.
The same evening or maybe the next day he came and said: “Wo ist die Studentin?” Women made a cross over me that I was done for. He took me inside the factory, into a dark gloomy room. In the oven, flames flickered, casting shadows on the walls. There was a bench along the wall, and he told me to sit down. French soldiers, captured war detainees, worked there; he called them in to tidy the room, and then he said: “Go on, tell me.”
I started to tell him most of it because that was what he wanted to know – about the ghetto, about events that happened in Auschwitz. I wasn’t able to describe it all, but I told him that they slaughtered people there in large numbers. Then I described the conditions in the camp where we presently were. He didn’t say anything but possibly thought until that time that we were real convicts who committed real crimes and were incarcerated for that reason. He had no idea that camps existed or what we had lived through. All this was a big new experience for him.
It must have been an important discovery for you to find out that those people had no knowledge of what was happening comparatively close by?
As a person who grew up in Masaryk’s republic I couldn’t imagine that there were people, around whom many terrible events occurred, who would know nothing about them. When I was leaving he held his head in his hands, and I saw that he was deeply disturbed. He wasn’t pretending. Why would he? For those people I wasn’t even a human being. I told myself that one had to observe what was happening and not just crawl into one’s own little corner without understanding what was going on.
We did precisely the same a few years after this. We didn’t know that there were concentration camps in Czechoslovakia where people were being murdered. Even if one realizes this, one tends to slide again into one’s own private domain and doesn’t look around. And when quite canny people govern the country, they turn you all into idiots.
We weren’t allowed to communicate with anyone, but we couldn’t be guarded all the time in the factory. So we were able now and then to find out small tidbits about what was happening outside the camps. We met a Frenchman and some Dutch people. They didn’t have much news but had something to tell, and we knew then that the war was nearing its end, that it was coming closer and that the Russians and Americans were advancing. It wasn’t definitive, but their advance was clear.
In the brick factory something was being built, and we passed on the bricks from hand to hand. Then we trudged out into the forest, we, starved women! There were gang leaders who organized the work but didn’t have much to do with us; I only observed their goings on. They were quite funny because they were such typical Germans, wearing cleaned and pressed white shirts, corduroy trousers, waistcoats and hats every day. They walked together – one, tall and thin, and the other, small and round, like Laurel and Hardy.
I was always such a small thin woman, and it happened often that someone started to feel sorry for me. One of those Germans got used to coming close to me and surreptitiously gave me a piece of bread and then left. We formed a special group of five women, and when we managed to find something edible, whatever it was – when somewhere there was an unripe apple, or a raw potato – we divided it into five pieces. And this German brought me a cooked potato or a chunk of bread daily. He noticed that we shared the spoil, so he said: “Please sit down here.” He was very polite toward me, as if I were a princess. He took out a clean white napkin, put a cooked potato on a small plate and said: “I brought this for you only, so you have to eat it all here.”
From then on he always brought me something to eat. He always behaved impeccably. I told him: “Please let me know your name. The war is ending, and I may be able to do something for you.” He responded: “No, I can’t. I can’t.”
He brought a knife, an ordinary kitchen knife. To have a knife in the camp one would immediately receive a death penalty, but it was a very handy object. We were given a small brick of bread for five prisoners, and we had nothing to cut it with. We had to break it when dividing it. It crumbled into small pieces, and we were very unhappy about losing even the smallest crumb. And now I had a knife, and because I had it from him, we called him “Kudla” [knife]. All camp women knew him as Kudla.
Then we were transferred to another workplace. And later it was closing down in preparation for evacuation, and no one was allowed to leave. No one was allowed in either. They left us lying there for several days without giving us any food, and we were extremely exhausted. Suddenly as I lay there half dead, a woman came and said: “Heda, Kudla’s here and is looking for you.”
I couldn’t imagine how he managed to get into the camp. Possibly he pretended to be delivering something or that he had to undertake a special mission, I don’t know. He arrived in a small, nicely painted wooden cart pulled by a horse, and drove it around the camp. I ran out, and when he saw me he reached into the cart and threw out a sack of potatoes and left. Then it was obviously a great treat. In the camp there was already chaos, and we broke apart what was wooden, made a fire and baked the potatoes. The whole of our barrack, every woman, had one or two potatoes; according to their size, we divided them fairly. And I can say every such potato became very handy when we were taken away for our next journey.
Perhaps he had fallen in love with you?
I was a thin whelp, ugly, shaved; I had no hair; he felt sorry for me and must have chosen me as a symbol of the oppressed people. He was a very rare, exceptional human being.
Heda Margolius Kovály, interview with Helena Třeštíková in Heda’s apartment, Soukenická, Prague, August 2000.
Courtesy Česká televize.
VIII
NOW OR NEVER
THE DEATH MARCH
Before the death march began, they gave us each a piece of bread and a coat. We still had that striped garb. We left the camp sometime in January 1945; we had no notion of time. I only remember arriving in Prague on February 22nd.
The winter was hard, and suddenly we had coats, most probably taken from people who had been gassed. So we all got a coat. A square was cut out on the back and sewn into it was a piece from the striped prison uniform that we wore in the camp. In the last workplace, we had worked alongside French captives. One of them was called Lucien; he came from Chamonix. He was a very helpful young man, and I asked him if he could find me a needle and thread. He brought me a small ball of thread and a needle.
When we found out about the march, my friend Hanička and I opened the coat seams with the knife where the cloth was folded over on the inside of the hem. We undid the seams and removed the striped squares. We sewed the cloth from the hems into the hole and put the original striped square over it. Both of us had those normal squares, but where the other coats had a cut out hole, we had the cloth from the coat now. Our handiwork looked awful, but it wasn’t too obvious either.
I kept saying: “Hanička, I won’t get myself locked up in another camp. If I don’t succeed in escaping, so be it; if it doesn’t work out, that’s it. I won’t let myself be locked up again. I’ve had enough!” Hanička agreed. So all during our walk toward the west, we were hatching an escape plan.
There is no point in describing the march. Many women didn’t survive. Many times we slept outside in the snow under the vast sky. Not long ago I talked to a woman who also survived but was based in a different camp and forced on a different march. I asked her: “Do you remember the food and drink we got?” She answered: “I can’t remember at all.” We must have had something. When we went through one village, people didn’t know who we were and thought that we must have been convicts normally sentenced for serious crimes, and despite that, they felt sorry for us and cooked us ordinary potatoes. Everyone got a potato sorted by size. But this happened relatively rarely.
At one time we came to a very well meaning village, and they told us: “We won’t let you sleep outside.” They shut us in a village hall and put the heating on, and we all nearly died. In the morning we came out with puffed up red faces because we weren’t used to the warm environment, and it nearly killed us. Once or twice we slept in a barn or other agricultural building but mostly outside in the snow.
Both Hanička and I were getting ready and told ourselves: “Since we’re walking in the same direction we’d have to go anyway, we’ll continue and decide once we get an opportunity.” We had it all worked out, but it turned out differently anyway. Finally we came to a village where there was a large barn, and they locked us in it. It wasn’t very favorable for an escape because the barn was surrounded by a wooden fence, and beyond that, a brick wall, so we had two obstacles to overcome.
In such gatherings the news spread by word of mouth, and some women managed to get near our guards and overheard something. One woman came and said: “Listen, we’re supposed to turn to the north tomorrow; we’ll never be so close to the border of the Czech territories again.”
We had no idea where we were, but Hanička and I told ourselves: “Either now or never.” However, we weren’t fully decided. Hanička went after her best friend who was there with us, a very good person, a very beautiful woman. She was the only one who didn’t mind her shaved head; she was always beautiful. I also had two friends, sisters from Prague called Eva and Hana; their father and my father were friends. They were very nice and kind women; they loved, looked after and encouraged each other. They were wonderful women. I came to them and said: “Listen girls, we want to escape. Be sensible, and come with us.” One of them would have come, but the younger one said: “I am terribly afraid – no.” I said: “Come on, what could be worse than the situation we are in now? If we escape we’ll give ourselves a chance to improve everything for the better. Even if we succeed in gaining freedom for just a couple of hours, it’ll be worth it. They might shoot you here anyway or during the run.” “No, simply no,” she answered. Such a decision requires a certain verve. One gets used to the suffering, but only if one knows what to expect. If you go into the unknown, it is more difficult, especially in the pitiful state we were in then.
Our march was headed for Bergen-Belsen, and that camp was hell. People trod on the corpses. There was a typhoid epidemic and who knows what else. That was the end, a total breakdown. Perhaps you have seen in documentaries on television how in April 1945 the British soldiers arrived and what they found there. That woman who would have had come with us died there. The other was saved and at the end of war, with some relatives, departed to Canada. She married there and had a daughter, but the whole time she suffered terribly because she prevented her sister from coming with us, which would have saved her. Finally she succumbed to it and committed suicide. I got a very moving letter from her daughter because she kept talking about how I had tried to persuade them and why they decided not to follow.
The same happened with Hanička’s friend: “I have no energy, I’m afraid, I can’t anymore – I can’t go any further.” She reached Bergen-Belsen and killed herself. This is something that greatly affected me – that a person has enough courage to kill himself or herself, which I would never have managed – but hasn’t enough courage to save one’s life. I can’t explain this to myself any better even today. I think the worst is to fall into apathy when a person creates for oneself crippling helplessness. Often I heard that Jews were so overwhelmed by fear that they didn’t defend themselves. That’s not true at all. Fear is terrible. During those years in the camps, I was totally depleted from fear. There one always lived in fear; only a madman would have no fear. But fear alone won’t stop you. As soon as a crack appeared in the camps through which a person could squeeze, detainees took advantage. Fear is terrible, but it doesn’t prevent you from functioning. What prevents you is incapacity. When you realize that you can’t do anything to change your situation; when you realize that whatever you do, you can only destroy yourself, and you can’t help anybody; when you realize you have no chance; then you don’t do anything. In addition to that, when one accepts it, creates it and gives in to helplessness, then that is the worst situation. I found it hard to understand. I was very sorry for them, because they were very fine women.
Finally, Hanička and I decided to run off that night. In that barn we slept on straw. In the early morning while it was still dark, I nudged Hanička and said: “Come on then, Hanička.” Hanička said: “But I’m so very cold.” I said: “You idiot, I’m going.” And I crawled out. In the evening beforehand I had dismantled the gate lock with my knife. It was already half hanging on very loosely anyway. I opened it more, so when I tugged at the gate it opened. I went out and waited for Hanička, and she still didn’t come. So I wandered around the empty yard, with no guards – they usually locked us in and went to sleep without giving a damn.
Heda Margolius Kovály, interview with Helena Třeštíková in Heda’s apartment, Soukenická, Prague, August 2000.
Courtesy Česká televize.
At last Hanička came out after all, and we ran quickly to the fence. And behind us another two women came. We knew them, but not closely. We clambered over the fence and then over the brick wall, and those two girls said: “Wait, there’s another one coming.” But she didn’t make it. We heard a shot – they killed her, poor thing.
We were stupid young women; we knew nothing. We didn’t even know which way north was, or south, so we crawled into a small wall recess and tried to decide what to do next. Suddenly a small girl came up to us. She was called Zdenička, such a pretty blonde and said: “You’ve escaped, haven’t you? I want to help you. We’re also Czechs.” I said: “Good God, my girl, you can’t talk to us. Go away, please. What would your mother say?” And she said: “My mother’s over there.” And there a woman stood. She had a scarf over her shoulders and kept nodding her head confirming th
at her daughter meant well. This little girl led us. She took us nearly all the way to the next village and said: “In this village you can go there and there, where there are people who are good, and you can turn to them if need be. They keep dogs too.” She simply gave us various directions, and when we came to the village she took off and went back. Afterward we sent them some presents, but they wouldn’t accept them. They must have been exceptional people. You know, it is so encouraging that there is always somebody who is really special.
Our short hair was a terrible problem and mainly because each of us looked the same. Hanička, I and the other two girls tore those striped squares off our coats and put the rags on our heads; we made sort of headscarves out of them to hide our short hair. The roads were full of people because of the evacuations and migration from the Polish borderlands back to Germany; there were carts, horses, pigs and I didn’t know what else. So we got lost amongst it all. That was lucky because all that time the Hitlerjugend, those young boys, combed through forests and chased after people like us. This way we blended in with the refugees who also looked more or less poorly, so it wasn’t that obvious. And we walked.
We came up to the truncated post-Munich Agreement border of the so-called Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren, and an obvious problem arose. We were wandering around and tried to think what to do next when a boy walked past, and we asked: “Hello, any idea if Mr. Čermák lives nearby?” And he replied: “No Mr. Čermák here.” And I said: “Do any Czechs live here?” And he said: “No Czechs live here.” And it looked like the last stop for us.
Suddenly, it was already evening. Factory gates opened, and a large group of workers walked out. Amongst them was a young woman. I heard her speaking Polish. I crept up to her and said: “We’d like to talk to you. Can you help us?” She was a Pole who had been commandeered to work there. She had a small daughter, and she led us to her apartment. She lived there in great poverty. We didn’t tell her we had come from the camps but that we had also been taken as forced labor and that we had been bombed and escaped and wanted to return home – and that we needed to get across the border. She said: “You know what – here lives a nice lady, and she could help you.”
Hitler, Stalin and I Page 5