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Toman Brod
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That now was beginning something that I intellectually understood, I had to study the writings of Marx, Stalin and similar, and orient myself in Communist ideology, but in my heart I was sorry that it was the end of an era, where discussion, opposition, expression of opinions other than Communist ones were possible.
These, idealistic reasons, led me to joining the Party in January of 1948. Even though it’s not possible to understand it unilaterally. By my nature I wasn’t a Communist, I had been raised in a democratic spirit, I came from a bourgeois family. In those days everyone’s origins were carefully investigated and a bourgeois origin was dangerous, it represented a huge impediment and a big minus for your profile.
We were very poor. Right after the war there was a currency reform, when all money was transferred to so-called fixed deposits, thereby all savings accumulated during the Protectorate became invalid. My mother had left behind some jewelry, which Mrs. Kopska had saved, and for example for one gold chain I bought myself a suit in Darex.
I chose history and finished in 1955. After graduation each student got a placement certificate, some sort of document, the right to work either in an institute or in some company. I applied for a position in the Military Historical Institute, where I and about five other fellow students started working in 1955.
In the meantime I got an offer, that people that wanted to study and actively participate in society, can apply, and if they didn’t have their high school diploma, that they had to finish it. For a few months after that I attended some sort of course, at its end I had an exam that substituted for a high school finals, and after that I could register at university.
For a long time I couldn’t go to school or work, it wasn’t until the beginning of 1948 that I began working as some sort of clerk in a company that in those days was named ‘Gramofonove zavody’ [Gramophone Works], where I worked for about two years.
Those few months before the end of the war, that was a battle for life. I was really calculating what would happen first, whether I’d die or the war would end. It was a matter of weeks, of days, of hours. I was in strategically unimportant Kladsko, which the armies aiming for Berlin and into the Protectorate at first skirted, and only the second wave arrived there.
After a few days, at the end of January 1945, they took me to yet another camp, so I lost touch with the rest of the boys. Of those thirty boys, only two of us unfortunately survived.
The food was meager, a person couldn’t come by anything extra any more. There was nothing in the fields, we looked for frozen acorns, but you couldn’t find anything, it was winter.
They took our group of twenty or thirty boys to the Gross-Rosen camp [21] in Silesia, and there it was an utter catastrophe. Yet another dimension of horror. It was already fall, cold, we had only summer clothing.
They were led back in a horrible fashion, accompanied by taunting music, some sort of march, then they gave them a sign to hold, how happy they are to be back again, they led them to our block’s courtyard, beat them horribly, and a few days later, when they had barely regained their health and hadn’t died straight away from the beating, they hung them. The gallows stood in the middle of the camp and the entire camp had to come watch the execution. And of course we were also witnesses to people being tortured in the courtyard of our block.
From these people we learned what had happened to the family camp. Of course we suspected it; it was they that finally confirmed it. They told us how exactly it had taken place; one prisoner showed us a box full of gold teeth. He probably smuggled them in, and then tried to exchange them for food or cigarettes or something like that.
On 10th July there was another mass murder, which was perhaps even bigger than the one in March, about seven thousand people from the Terezin family camp were murdered over two nights. Women with children, old, sick people, they simply all died in the gas chambers. It was the end of the family camp. It was also the death of my mother.
I remember that he was standing on the right, and we, naked with clothes and shoes in our hands, marched past him. He then indicated whether we could survive, or couldn’t. He pointed about ninety boys in the right direction. The registrar then recorded their numbers. I had the luck to be among them. He sent us to the neighboring camp.
They picked my brother as well. He however didn’t survive, he apparently died in the spring of 1945, either due to illness or during the death marches.
Hitler’s chief doctor Dr. Josef Mengele used to walk about there. He was this man who was always in a perfect uniform, always wore white gloves, he looked very distinguished and acted very kindly towards the children, like an uncle. Simply no one would have believed that he’s a murderer. This was of course all a big fraud, a sham.
In it we had a teacher who tried to occupy us somehow: the small children played or sang, the older ones had some sort of studies; it helped us to for at least a while forget the excruciating hunger.
On top of that of course the brutality of the functionaries, the SS… Basically the entire shock of arriving in Auschwitz was horrible. You know, those are the various degrees of horror. Now we had once again sunk to a lower level, to a higher category of horror.
In Terezin it was something else again, though even that Terezin wasn’t the worst. Horror has its dimensions.
In the summer of 1940 they threw me out of school [see Exclusion of Jews from schools in the Protectorate] [13], after that I was only allowed to associate with Jewish boys and girls. This sort of ghetto was created, which didn’t allow us out, not many people wanted or were even allowed to associate with us. When some Christians came over for a visit, it was a secret. They didn’t want to take the risk and we didn’t want to endanger them.
Anti-Jewish measures became worse and worse. At first we weren’t allowed to go to restaurants, to the theater, to the cinema, shopping hours were limited, we weren’t allowed to own radios, telephones, jewelry was confiscated, we weren’t allowed out after 8pm, we weren’t allowed to go to the town square, to the park, to the Vltava river, we weren’t allowed to buy various goods…Of course this I already felt…
Of course, it was a secret, because at that time Jews were already not allowed to go to any communal camps, but he risked it and thanks to him we spent two nice months in the company of other young people.
While we still could, we tried to go out on trips somewhere. In the summer of 1940 we found out that somewhere in Jablonna nad Orlici some man was accepting Jewish children and youths, but also Christian children and youths, for stays at a summer house.
Because the anti-Jewish measures were increasing, and we, the children, could for example no longer go play at a normal playground, our playground became the old Jewish cemetery.
The whole building on Masna Street knew that there was a Jewish family there, but no one ratted on us. Likely it was a peculiarity, maybe not really a peculiarity, but for sure it wasn’t common, but that’s the way it was.
We lived in an apartment together with two other families. But because our cook was a Christian, she rented a two-room apartment under her name on Masna Street, and we actually lived there with her.
The apartment on Veletrzni Street was still under our name, but we weren’t there long, Uncle Jindrich Petrovsky convinced us to move into ‘his’ building on today’s Obranci Miru Street. But a few months later the Germans threw us out of there. The thing was, that at that time the Germans were going around and looking at Jewish apartments, and an apartment that they liked, they confiscated.
Once he wrote ‘Jews out’ or something like that on our door. I didn’t understand it, I figured that some kid had scrawled some stupidity, but my father was very agitated by it.
Before the war I practically never met up with anti-Semitism. During my whole time at school I never heard the word Jew, or some anti-Semitic comment. We were Czech boys and we played soccer together, fought together, and I don’t know what else.