In August of 1968 I received an invitation to a conference that was held each year in the Austrian Alps. I accepted it, my wife and daughter accompanied me to Vienna, then they returned home, and the occupation [see Prague Spring] [29] surprised them here.
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Toman Brod
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Once my wife was returning with her sister from East Germany; they had bought some shoes that hadn’t made it here yet, and then they trembled with fear, hoping that they wouldn’t be confiscated at the border. Because it also happened that he customs officials, when you bought something that exceeded the allowed value, confiscated it.
We could buy things for about a thousand, two thousand crowns. Of course, all sorts of things were smuggled in, or our German friends, when they came for a visit, brought us gifts and various things, it wasn’t again all that impermeable.
My wife also worked at the Academy of Sciences, though before that she had worked at the Central State Archive, but because she fairly often came into contact with foreigners, the secret police were interested in her, and one day they told her that she can’t work in the secret document archive. They didn’t jail or fire her, but they gave her another position, for a few years after that she participated in the creation of an encyclopedic dictionary at the Encyclopedic Institute of the Academy of Sciences.
Of course this was all news. Everyone stood in amazement when we, the historians, who had access to secret materials, were telling them this. And can you imagine what sort of a shock it was for Communist functionaries, when they heard about it? How we, also Communists, are disrupting the Party and social monolith...
At the beginning of the 1960s the time of horrors passed, it was again somewhat freer, and I got an offer from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, to concern myself with international and Czechoslovak politics under their auspices. I accepted, in 1963 I transferred to an institute that concerned itself with the history of Eastern Europe.
Now I said, ‘so now I’m suddenly out of that relatively civilized environment of Terezin in a concentration camp.’ They threw us on some pallets, luckily they didn’t make a selection, led us off to the showers, where they stripped us, shaved us, tattooed numbers on us and gave us some prison rags, they were already disinfected and were horrible, plus wooden shoes and we looked like scarecrows.
They unloaded us at Auschwitz, at that time there wasn’t yet a spur line to Birkenau. It was horribly cold there, it was a freezing December day, around us the barking of dogs and the SS and prisoners in that striped clothing. Before that we hadn’t seen prisoners in striped clothing, in Terezin we wore normal civilian clothes, there were no prison uniforms there.
We left Terezin on the December transport in 1943, for Auschwitz. We got the summons on these strips of paper, and so we proceeded in the morning with the remnants of our luggage, the cattle wagons arrived, they threw some of our luggage into them, stuffed about 60 or 70 of us people into one wagon, plus they stuck in a pail of tea and another big pail as a toilet, and sealed the wagon.
For young people life in Terezin wasn’t the worst thing. During their time there they managed to adapt to the local conditions, they managed to make some connections in the kitchen or with the guards, they went to work in gardens outside of the ghetto, so they would bring back some vegetables, they got packages…
But there were amazing lectures. Historical lectures, philosophical lectures, law lectures, musical theory, Jewish history… I’m saying that Terezin was in this respect the freest town in the entire Protectorate or Reich.
The paradox of Terezin was that on the one hand people were dying of hunger, desperation, dirt, disease, hopelessness, but on the other hand people played soccer, there were concerts, operas such as Brundibar, The Bartered Bride and so on.
So we got one or two packages from her even in Auschwitz. Then it stopped. The packages weighed about five kilos, three to five kilos. Of course bread was sent, some flour, cream of wheat…simply basic foodstuffs. Maybe some salami, it was a big help.
We got packages that were sent to us by our former cook, Mrs. Kopska, and this on the other hand was a huge material support. It wasn’t a simple thing, the post office was accepting less and less packages, and if for example some anti-Semitic clerk was sitting behind the counter, he would peer suspiciously at them, in the sense of ‘what are you, Christians, doing sending packages to Jews?’ Another thing was finding the food, which wasn’t at all a simple matter, because food was rationed via coupons.
As I am saying, for me Terezin wasn’t so horrible. It may also have been due to the fact that we were 13, 14 years old and we were starting to live like young people, we were beginning to experience loves, we were forming impressions of what it was going to be like when we would once again be able to live like normal people; it was the springtime of our lives.
At noon we had time off, and we would go visit our mother. In the afternoon there might have been some smaller chores: we took care of the garden, or played soccer, read and so on. We also sometimes went to see some performance, to see Brundibar or something else. Under the guidance of our tutors we also rehearsed a varied repertoire of our own, the girls joined us and together we put together some recitals, theater, concerts, played various games…
In the afternoon we would have lessons. And what was taught? Mostly they talked about food; it’s interesting that in concentration camps they always talked about food. There they’d cook in their imaginations, exchange recipes, talk about what’s the first thing we’ll make for dinner when they liberate us. Of course we studied mathematics, we studied history, religion, naturally.
My mother lived in the Hamburg barracks, I lived in school L417, and my brother lived in a different boys’ home.
My family, my mother, brother and I, went to Terezin on 27th July 1942.
The first of our relatives to be deported were my uncles Jindrich and Jiri Petrovsky with their families: already in 1941 they went with all their children to Lodz [ghetto] [18].
That day our mother left to go sleep in Kozi Street, but it was crowded, infested, dirty, that many people couldn’t maintain any hygiene, and so we two boys stayed that night as well, after martial law was proclaimed, in the apartment on Masna Street. The Hitlerites however were conducting inspections of all buildings, to see if there wasn’t someone unregistered there; they were combing through Prague, looking for the assassins.
There were Christians that helped us, of course: our cook, she also had her connections, and then there were friends from when we were still in that house on the riverside… This one Christian woman used to come over, Miss Janska. We always looked forward to her coming over, not only because of the news she would bring us, but also because to celebrate her visit.
After all, we’re not going to abandon our real estate that we have here, our sawmill, while it doesn’t belong to us any more, we still have to watch over it somehow.’ Karel, who had the Christian wife, collaborated with the Germans in some fashion, or perhaps she collaborated, so they were protected in some way, and thus stayed here.
Some of our friends emigrated while there was till time, but no one in our family left the country. All of the Petrovsky brothers stayed here, because they had property here, they couldn’t take their buildings and factories and their farms on their backs. They said to themselves: ‘We’ll survive it.
At one meeting I imprudently compared the methods of Party politics and police to the methods of the Gestapo. Which the ‘politruks’ [or political officer, representative of the Czechoslovak Communist Party responsible for politically educational matters] made a note of. It was immediately investigated, the secret police came to see me; they even tried to draft me as a collaborator... They wanted to expel me from the Party. It was a very dangerous situation.
I myself was always looking for some model that would combine socialism with democracy. That would combine an Eastern system with a Western one, I was looking for a third way, which of course was also nonsense, but I simply didn’t want to give up the idea of reforming socialism somehow.
We had a student wedding at the Old Town city hall; I had practically no money to pay for it. It was really student-style, it was on 30th April 1954 and right the next day we went to the [May Day] parade.
Libuse was fairly politically conscious, more of proletarian origin, even though her father was a policeman, so not really a proletarian. After the war their entire family devoted themselves to politics and joined the Communist party. My wife was a committed member of the Czechoslovak Socialist Youth Movement.
During my studies, in 1952, I also met my future wife. She was named Libuse Kvasnickova, was three years younger than me and came from Moravia. We met at the school residence in Opletalova Street, where I used to go see my friends, to hold various parties or rehearsed all sorts of amusing theatre performances.
There were people there, who very closely watched our behavior; everything was recorded in cadre critiques.