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Displaying 28681 - 28710 of 50826 results
Jiri Franek
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Our work was minimal. We were to obtain matches, you can’t very well imagine what it meant to try to find matches in Auschwitz. Besides that we were to find blankets, those we more or less had, and containers for water. Our plan was the following: when the time comes for us to go to the gas chambers, we’ll set our straw mattresses on fire to create confusion. We’ll throw wet rags, that’s why the water, on the electric fence to short it out. And then we’ll run towards the partisans. We even had a map, which thanks to money from Avi Edelstein we got from the Polack Leshek.
At that time jews were becoming members of the already illegal Communist Party. There was no party ID, I can’t give an exact date, in fact even before I entered the concentration camp I was surrounded by some Communists, then in the concentration camp I became a direct member of a Communist cell.
We were inside where it was warm and taught children, instead of spreading gravel on a road in the freezing cold with our hands, because there were next to no tools. Or if when there was widespread hunger, and some person took the piece of meat intended for the entire camp and cut off half of it for his own dinner, that’s a difference. We didn’t have to go out into the freezing cold, we didn’t have to perform hard physical labor and were always together. An intellectual society that constantly held together intellectually, that was why relatively many ‘Betreuer’ survived.
Maybe because they saw how it came about. I don’t know if children are really that interested in literature, but when I was presenting Czech poetry to them, they really did pay attention and asked questions. I knew a lot of war poetry, and particularly that interested the children, they could understand it, after all, they also had personal experiences with the war. To this day I’m proud of that work, that I managed to put together material for that collection of Czech poetry in such difficult conditions.
Later they even painted it [this means that the painter Gottliebova was allowed to paint pictures on the bare walls, which is a very unusual story], but we weren’t allowed to have any teaching aids, we were allowed to teach, but there wasn’t anything to teach from, they already knew that those children were going to die, so they mercifully let us teach. They didn’t really care whether we were teaching or not, while in Terezin teaching was not allowed.
So it happened that suddenly I received a summons for transport. It was a question of a half day, during which I could certainly have gotten an exception, that I was indispensable, that I’m working in war manufacture. But I said to myself, here I’m alone, and my mother is there, it never even occurred to me that she could be dead, my brother is there, he’s already settled there, he’s a clever guy, he’ll certainly already have some good job.
In Terezin the Germans erected a large tent and that’s where we worked. We manufactured car motor heaters. When their vehicles froze up in Russia they had to think of some solution, after all they were quite clever, so they came up with these gas heaters that heated up the motor from below without damaging it, and the vehicles could continue on.
The last time I saw my mother was in Terezin, when she came to visit me in the hospital. I was lying there with a fever, so I don’t have any concrete memories of her visit. My mother was very sensitive, she didn’t want to upset me, so she held herself back when she was saying farewell to me.
Despite everything, in Terezin a person did find a way of life. There was cultural life. Not long ago I was thinking about the fact that Terezin’s cultural life has one negative aspect, that it suppresses the horrors that existed there. The cultural life there was so exceptional and such a miracle, that many people are interested only in it. They then don’t realize the horrors, the suffering and death. Terezin’s cultural life was immense and multifaceted, operas were written, books, but the most significant were events put on for the public.
In L 417 I got to test the knowledge I had from Scouts, how to deal with younger children, even though I myself was still young. I discovered the talent for teaching in myself, which then never left me. Only when they later threw me out and I had to work on the railway did I stop working as a teacher.
‘All right, from today you’re with me.’ I went to L 417, where a magazine called Vedem [17] was being put out by Petr Kincl. L 417 was divided up into classes, each class had a group and that group was also called a ‘home.’ So there the word home had two meanings – ‘sub-home’ and ‘home’ you could say. All of L 417 was a home and within it there were individual homes.
In Brno at high school I made friends that then later helped me very much in the concentration camp. One professor, today very well known, Eisinger, took a liking to me as the best student of Czech, but at the same time made a great impression on me as a Communist at the school I’m going to talk about in a moment.
I should perhaps say one more thing, that we had never had it as good as before our departure for Terezin. People actually would bring us bread, butter, smoked meat, everything; at that time they already knew that we’d be deported.
We left Vysoke Myto for Terezin on 2nd December 1942, as still a whole family. We arrived there on 5th December, and stayed together during our time there. I remember when we were getting onto the Terezin transport, it was very interesting, one of the merriest days. For us kids it was a gas, we were young and didn’t have a clue as to what was really happening.
The resistance movement was initiated and organized by the Party. We were very strongly organized. Now they don’t want to recognize the resistance at Birkenau [14], it’s a sad chapter, how one set of communists says, ‘We were the true resistance.’ Other communists, ‘No, you weren’t the true resistance, we were the true resistance.’ I got into the resistance via the Party. No rebellion took place, because we found out that this time we really were being transported off to work. But the resistance was prepared.
,
During WW2
See text in interview
Meeting this professor at the beginning of the war was one of the things that led me to further activities in the [Communist] Party in the concentration camp. When we came to Auschwitz, the Party promptly changed into an illegal resistance movement and united itself with Czech jews, German jews, with Zionists.
This now changed, because more and more we were herded into a group. For me it had a fateful significance that all of those young people were suddenly leftists. I still recall how one Karel said about another Karel: ‘You know, so what? Karel will inherit the shop, and when we’re going to have Communism, then Karel will be store manager. Practically nothing will change, in fact he’ll be better off, because now, when there’s a crisis, he’s got to spend his own money, this way the state will help him out.
I recall that on the day of the occupation of Czechoslovakia, we were standing outside of the high school, because the doors still hadn’t been opened. And this one old friend, who after the annexation of the border areas had sat at our place and discussed politics, suddenly says, ‘You jews are now going to have to hang onto your hats, just wait, you’re going to have to hang onto your hats.’ It wasn’t just a statement of fact, it was ugly.
One day I got up the guts and started to fight back, and beat him up, from that time on he left me alone.
Up to the year 1938 I have no real memories of anti-Semitism. When I really try, I can remember two or three incidents. In fact, I remember my mother once saying, as we were talking about school, ‘He’s an anti.’ And I said, ‘What’s anti?’ And she said, ‘Well, an anti-Semite.’ And I replied, ‘So why are you saying anti? And what is it?’ So she named some teachers, who in her opinion were anti-Semitic.
When my father died, my mother had financial problems, she needed money for the household and for the business. She had to borrow money, the poor woman didn’t suspect that in the end the Germans would take it all from us anyways. Mary had some savings, so she lent us 30 thousand, which was an enormous sum in those days.
In the end the Germans forced us out of even there, we had to move out. The Germans took over the entire building and moved in various families we didn’t know. One of the meagrest apartments, out on the courtyard gallery, was given to a lady whose children had unfortunately died, she had tuberculosis and had to be in a sanatorium. We reached an agreement with her that she would rent the apartment to us until she returned. Only thanks to this, were we able to remain in the house where I had been born.
When Hitler was advancing and poverty came, we started to rent some of the rooms, where the workshops were. At that time my mother’s business was barely scraping by, we were poor and my mother had to let the servants go.
We had a nice one-story house with a large courtyard. My mother got it from my grandfather [Moritz Pfeifer] as her dowry. It was a huge farmyard, in one section we had four rooms and an enormous kitchen, where the maids lived. In another part of the building were workshops where my mother conducted her business.
We were a sort of family centre, where everyone met. We even slept on the floor, because there were so many of us. At Christmas we served typical jewish food, roasted goose livers with whipped goose fat gravy. Everyone looked forward to it. Our neighbor, Mrs. Koudelova, who lived below us, used to cook for us.
All of us did this, whether Catholic, Protestants or jews. Thanks to these progressive ideas at the Vysoke Myto high school, I lost whatever jewish upbringing, religion, that existed there. There were interesting counterpoints, on the one hand were we the youth, there were maybe three or five of us at jewish religion classes, and we would say: ‘Why do I need, Alef, Bet [Hebrew alphabet] for me it’s enough to know A, B, C, D’ and similar things.
New Year [Rosh Hashanah] was also observed, I don’t even know why, and the Long Day [Yom Kippur] was also observed. These two were observed and my mother had a theory on this, that once a year she cleaned the whole house, so that once a year the body’s insides also has to be cleaned out [fasting], that it’s not so much about God as about that good cleaning out.
When my father died, my mother decided that we were going to have bar mitzvahs. My brother at least had it in some sort of celebratory fashion and according to custom got long pants [Long pants were a proclamation that according to jewish ritual, a boy had become a man]. For me there were no long pants left, so I had short pants.
I have this feeling that I was born in a completely different town, country, on a different planet than all of my current friends, who I think grew up in similar conditions, and yet recall with great sentiment all the jewish holidays and jewish life. How they walked the streets with a cap – a kippah on their head, anti-Semitism, how they were persecuted. We lived and entirely Christian lifestyle. I have no memories of anti-Semitism from my youth, of course at the end of the 1930s that changed very rapidly, from day to day.