Officially I couldn’t go to the third grade and I began attending these secret classes for Jewish children. We would meet by the Pardubice synagogue and the classes were held in the rabbi’s apartment. The Pardubice rabbi was named Feder, if I remember correctly.
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Pavel Werner
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I remember that I had to go to this school via a long detour, because as a Jew I was already wearing a star and wasn’t allowed to be on certain streets.
In Pardubice I started attending school, I managed to only finish two grades, then they banned us from attending a normal school.
I remember that a little ways off from us along the road into town, when you walked through the park, there was this little shop in town, in whose display window the ‘Vlajkari,’ members of Vlajka [10], an organization of Czech Fascists, had an information center. Back then I was attending second grade, I already knew how to read, so I could read what was written there. There were texts aimed against Jews. Jews were drawn there with these big noses, they looked like disgusting creatures. I remember it very well, that I was standing there, read it, looked at the pictures and thought about it.
At that time my father lost his job, they fired him from the Kudrnac company, that I remember well. They sent him to work with other Jewish men: in Pardubice they cleaned the brook, sewers; they walked about with shovels and did various manual labor.
We had a nice apartment on the first floor, with a large dining room, a kitchen and one more room. We also employed a maid.
My childhood in Pardubice was at least in the beginning joyful and I enjoy recalling it. At home we spoke Czech; German was spoken only when my parents didn’t want my sister and me to understand them. But because I took private German lessons from some Mrs. Hochova, I knew German practically from childhood and I even learned that old-fashioned lettering, ‘Kurrent’ [Kurrentschrift, also known as black-letter script]. I took German lessons, along with a friend of mine, with Mrs. Hochova, who was this old, wicked Jewess. I was afraid of her – she had this big, mean dog, a Doberman.
I remember that as soon as my father came home from his travels, the whole gang would get together in a pub or café, and play the card game Marias. He had this notebook, in which he would record how much he had won and how much he had lost. I think that in this respect my mother had a lot of problems with him.
My father was a sales agent for the Kudrnac company, which manufactured various rubber products, and had its head office in Nachod [the company exists to this day under the name Rubena].
He found work here, later in the 1930s when he met my mother, he settled here. I can’t say that we were badly off, we for example had a maid, but we didn’t have a car and on the whole our family wasn’t in the same class with the rest of the members of the family, the rest of the Werners were a somewhat higher class. My father spoke Czech and sometimes German, we never heard even a word of Polish from him.
So in the end I got into the University of Economics, I had to work hard, because I had in the meantime gotten married, after a four-year courtship, and my wife and I were expecting a child. We didn’t have any money. I had nothing at all and my wife wasn’t from any sort of wealthy family either. I had an ordinary rubber briefcase and one pair of worn pants that I had to constantly repair, because I couldn’t afford new ones. I of course lived in a dormitory. I had money only from allowances that I collected as an orphan and a needy person. I had no money, what I had left over I had to spend on the dormitory and food vouchers. After the wedding it was quite harsh, because we had no place to live.
In my papers it was written that I was a Jew, but I was also a worker cadre, I was a member of the Party, so in the end they couldn’t reject me.
However, during the time when I was making my decision as to what I would do next, the Bata company was nationalized, and that possibility no longer existed, so I decided for commerce school, where I at least studied two languages. Studies were arranged so that one week we would work from 6am to 12pm, and then we had school from 2pm to 6pm. The next week it switched around, we would attend classes in the morning and from 2pm to 10pm we would work. We had a huge load, it was tough to manage all your studies and on top of that regularly work in the factory.
In Zlin they sensed that I was very leftist-oriented, so they accepted me into the Youth Union, I traveled around doing lectures, various schooling, I was active in this respect.
After absolving the one-year course, my guardian Eisner asked me what I’d like to do next. I told him that I’d like to work as a gardener or forest warden, some occupation that is close to nature. At first he didn’t say anything, but when after a time I repeated it to him, he told me to forget about it, that I’d have no place to live, as in those days those jobs didn’t come with any accommodations, no residence and support. And so my guardian said that he knew someone in Zlin, some Mr. Devaty, that I’d go apprentice as a shoemaker in Zlin, that I’ll learn to be a shoemaker and during my studies will also have accommodations at a dormitory. It wasn’t however just like that, that a person decided to be a shoemaker and that they immediately accepted him – I had to go to Zlin to take some exams, which took two days; I had to do psycho-technical tests. I didn’t want to be a shoemaker for my entire life, stand at an assembly line and do the same thing over and over again. However, I went to that school mainly because that there was the possibility after finishing to decide for one of two specializations – as part of the Bata [17] plants there was a so-called export school, which educated sales people, which I was interested in.
I left the Jewish faith, because I said to myself that if all of those wartime events could have happened, the Holocaust, that God can’t exist, so that I’m an atheist.
I worked as a librarian there, I was in charge of the library, and attended a so-called one-year course, which was extended schooling.
I started going to school in Pardubice, the fourth grade of public school. I had to study hard to catch up to everything. I did practically nothing but study, I sat up with my schoolbooks until late at night.
Moses Werner was already a very old man. He wrote me that unfortunately they can’t take me in with them in Palestine, probably because they weren’t very well off financially. For some time, about a year or two after the war, he used to send me parcels. I’d always get some food and an accompanying letter in terribly quaint Czech, because my uncle knew only Polish. I broke off contact with my uncle after a few years, because it was dangerous to correspond with foreign countries, let alone Israel.
I came by our family photos more or less by chance, because they weren’t on the list. But after the war I visited Mr. Lochmann in Pardubice, with whom we had lived after they had moved us out of our apartment. He told me that there was some sort of suitcase up in the attic, that he didn’t know what it contained. Either he really never opened it, or he already knew what was in it, I really didn’t care. We climbed up into the attic and in that suitcase I found all of our family albums, all of our family photographs.
After I returned home, I remembered my father’s words, what he had told me before the selection, about the things hidden in the shed. So I dug in the spot that my father had described to me, I thought that I’d find some valuables there. I found a five-liter pickle jar. In the jar were only documents and papers, birth certificates and residence certificates. But I also found a list of things, where it was written what my parents had hidden and with whom. My guardian, a professor from the Pardubice Commerce Academy, got a hold of that list, and reclaimed those things from people. I know that he was very upset, that some didn’t want to return them. They however weren’t valuables; they were things like for example two easy chairs, underwear that people couldn’t return anyways, it was already worn out. I got back books – Goethe, Schiller, Dumas, Capek.
So the guys and I decided that we’d go home on foot. We calculated it to be about ninety kilometers. Three of us picked up and set out on foot for Bratislava. How we found the way, that I don’t know. It was quite a dramatic trip. It was June 1945, horribly hot, we were extremely weak, so we agreed amongst each other that we couldn’t manage the trip during the day, that we’d walk at night. We didn’t have any gear, food, nothing.
On 4th May 1945 the Americans liberated us in Gunskirchen. Roughly fifty years later, a reunion of former prisoners and American soldiers, liberators, took place in that village. All of those soldiers were already old men; they came with their wives and had these baseball caps with the number of their brigade.
Already in April we had no food or water whatsoever, we drank from puddles. In Gunskirchen we couldn’t even lie down when we wanted to sleep, because the building was completely packed full – we had to sit in rows behind each other with our legs spread, so that we could fit. We couldn’t go lie down outside, because it was in the forest and in April it was still very cold, the nights were cold, it was raining, wet. Well, just horrible. So if it would have lasted about fourteen days longer, maybe not even, we’d have started to go nuts, be out of it, it was only a question of days, and we wouldn’t have survived.
I remember that when Auschwitz was being liquidated, our Rapportführer [German for report leader] said that we shouldn’t go on the death march, that we were really still children, that we should stay in the camp, because the trip would be extremely hard. But we shouted, ‘we’re strong, we’ll go,’ because we were afraid to stay in the camp with the old, weak and sick – we already knew that it smelled of something unpleasant. We were afraid that they’d kill us on the spot, though the gas chambers weren’t working any more, but that they would shoot us or get rid of us in some other fashion. So it was decided that we’d go. Which was, when I look back at it, a big mistake, because we wouldn’t have had to undertake that difficult death march, and for another thing, within about ten days the Russians arrived at the camp.
Ludek and I had a so-called commune, which meant that I found him something, he organized it further along, and the end result we split fairly amongst ourselves. Ludek always cleverly organized something, whereas I wasn’t as capable, so he always gave me hell, that I hadn’t stolen anything.
In Auschwitz I at first worked in a so-called clothing warehouse, in the ‘Kleiderkammer,’ which was an amazing score. It was excellent, because for one I was working indoors, where I sorted all sorts of things and clothing, and for another I could pick out for myself some clothes that fit, winter clothes, a winter coat. Of course, the most important thing was that I could pick out shoes – excellent shoes that lasted me the whole death march, I walked all the way home in them. Thanks to that, I didn’t have to walk around barefoot or in wooden shoes.
So we saw those silhouettes of people in Camp B. Even though it was hard to see, you couldn’t see faces, because it was quite far. And suddenly I saw my parents. I recognized them by their silhouettes, that it was them, especially when they were standing beside each other. They recognized me as well. Both my mother and father were there, we began waving at each other. For a while we stood there like that and then we had to leave again. The next day we again came to the wire and again we saw each other, recognized each other and waved at each other. And the third day there was no one there. We didn’t know exactly what had happened, someone said that they sent them into the gas, but no one wanted to believe that. We didn’t believe it, we weren’t in a situation where we could say to ourselves, well, and now they’re gone. Up until the end of the war I wasn’t convinced that they had died there, a person still hoped. None of us believed it, everyone hoped even when they returned home, that perhaps their parents would still return.
My group, where there were a few of us boys, joined up with another group, so all together there were about 90 young boys and we relocated to Camp D, the so-called men’s camp. The next day we found out that across Camp C, across the wires, you could see into Camp B. We saw wires and the silhouettes of those that still remained in Camp B – about 90% of the people from the selection remained there. Us 90 boys they sent to Camp D, and only a small percentage of those that Mengele chose for work, went to Camp A. All of us boys immediately pressed as close as possible to those electrically charged wires. It was possible to get within about a half meter, because everywhere there were signs in German and Polish ‘danger of death’, everywhere there were signs with a skull and crossbones. When someone approached the wires, they shot at them.
Liza Lukinskaya
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Once I met a Lithuanian soldier, who used to play in a brass band in our yard in Siauliai. Though he saw me when I was a girl, he recognized me. He also gave me a large chunk of bread and sausage and saw me off to the gate of the ghetto. Once I was in the group of the youth sent to harvest potatoes in the village. I was missing my husband. In about three days he came and brought me a couple of candies. My husband made it possible for me to leave work there and come back to the city. People from the ghetto were often taken to work to other cities. Some of them were even taken to Estonia. We were afraid of being included in those teams. People said that Estonian policemen were very cruel and working conditions were very harsh. People died there very quickly. At any rate, I don’t know any single survivor from those who worked in Estonia. Once I was included in that team and policemen came to get me. I was given some time to pack and they took me. I thought I wouldn’t see Ilia ever again. Shortly after that he came. With the help of his friends Ilia made arrangements for me to be released – as if I was sick and couldn’t work in Estonia. Those friends of my husband were from the underground.