They gave me another placement, this time for Agroprojekt Liberec. There they once again informed me that they didn't need an architect, and that my task would be agitating for and starting up agricultural cooperatives, later the JZD [29]. I said to myself that I didn't study in order to start up agricultural cooperatives, and that even the Communist Party can't want that an architect into whom they invested money should go found JZD's. I simply didn't start there, which was a crime back then.
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jiri munk
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At the faculty, anti-Semitism showed itself mainly from the direction of the cadre [political] department. Often I was accused of not involving myself in politics enough. Once the cadre officer even summoned me, some laborer from Kolbenka [CDK], he began talking about how he didn't like Jews, and it ended with the words, 'And we'll drive all you Jews into concentration camps again anyways. That's where you belong!
Actually, during my studies I experienced the worst era, when everything had to be done exactly like it was in the Soviet Union. There were unbelievable things happening back then. We weren't allowed to design wide windows, because in the USSR they were narrow. Our professors - the best architects of that time, who before the war had designed famous functionalist villas in Baba [city ward of Prague 6] and other noted buildings, were now continually going to Moscow and bowing down before the bizarre architectural creations there. Architecture had been completely violated. This is why no great architect arose from our generation, because we were deformed, just like the times.
One day the StB also came to our clubhouse, they beat us, threw all our things outside and closed the clubhouse.
The high school was on Dusni Street [city ward of Prague 1], today there's a business academy there. Once again, my 'uncle' registered me there. My mother maybe even didn't know where I was going. She never even came to the high school to ask how I was doing. All she had to do was sign the class record book. That's why I was already completely independent in high school, and due to our financial situation, I did brigade work during summer holidays to make money.
But otherwise I really found myself in the scouting movement. After the war I felt like I didn't belong anywhere, I was suddenly practically without relatives, without anything. I think that basically all the survivors felt uprooted and yearned to fit in somewhere. They had no property, families, relatives, jobs, they didn't have those things that normally make up a person's collective and supports him. Later some people found this support in the Communist Party, I chose the Scouts. In scouting I found a new way of self-realization as well as a replacement collective. I accepted the ideals of scouting as my own. Unfortunately it all ended after 1948, when the scouting movement was forbidden.
Erich Wildau brought me into a scout troop [18] that he'd already belonged to before we became friends. So I experienced my nicest years after the war among scouts, up until the Scout movement was forbidden.
After the war we were utterly poor, we didn't even have anything to wear. Back then lists of war damages were being put together, and who for example knew how to bribe also got some reparations, but our mother didn't know how to arrange things like this, so we didn't get a thing. She only got 300 crowns for me, she herself used to get 600. After the war I was the poorest in my class.
My sister and brother returned home still in 1945, but several months later than Mother and I. For a long time we had no news of my brother, and we had no clue whether he was even alive.
For a long time after the war, Mother believed that Father would return, even when he had already been declared dead. She was completely lost without him. A person can't imagine what sort of situation she found herself in. My mother didn't have any higher education, not even a high school diploma. She only had mercantile school and some business courses, and was completely helpless when it came to the practical things in life. She had been used to our father doing everything. There were probably more women like that back then.
When we arrived in Brandys, Mother went to have a look inside our house, and found someone else living there. Alone, without our father, our mother wasn't able to deal with anything and so let those people keep on living there.
I don't think a person could feel that much of joy again. It was an indescribable feeling, when the Russians arrived in Terezin on their tanks. The first thing they did was that they stopped the tanks and pulled down all the fences between the road and Terezin. But then they saw another fence that separated Terezin from where the prisoners from the extermination camps and death transports were being treated, and because they didn't know anything about the quarantine or these prisoners' situation, they let them out.
At the end of the war my brother ended up in a death transport. They loaded him and other half-dead prisoners onto a train, locked them in, didn't give them anything to eat or drink, and for several days they traveled somewhere, so that half the people in the wagon died during the trip. What's more, they were attacked by Allied planes, who thought that it was a military transport. They shot the locomotive to pieces, so the train remained standing on a track somewhere in a forest.
My brother then lived through horrible things. Our father evidently went straight into the gas in Auschwitz, but my brother passed through Auschwitz and got into another concentration camp, by the name of Kaufering, I don't know for sure.
Then when in 1944, at the age of 16, skinny but tall for his age, my brother was standing on the ramp in Auschwitz in front of the selection, some SS-man noticed his watch and asked him, 'What kind of watch is that?' My brother answered something back, and the SS-man said to him, 'OK, give it to me!' My brother gave him the watch without hesitation, because you then had to give everything away anyways. But the SS-man then also asked how old my brother was, and when he answered that he was 16, he gave him this advice, 'During the selection, say that you're already 18.' And my brother has always been convinced that this incident saved his life, because if he would have said that he was 16, he would probably have gone straight into the gas.
A person stopped being a person, and became just a number. I remember that already during the trip to Terezin, we had numbers, I was CM390. In the transports to Auschwitz, a person got a new number. Twice my mother and I stood by the open wagons, showing our numbers to Rahm for the last time, and twice he sent us away. Most likely he had information that my mother was working with mica.
I also remember the celebrated visit by the International Red Cross. Back then all of Terezin was being cleaned up, fixed up and various props were being built. A coffee shop was even set up. Worthless money began to be issued, so-called 'Ghettogeld,' with which you could however not buy anything. A store was opened, where you couldn't buy anything, but where various mustard substitutes and other 'groceries' were put on display. I've even kept a 'savings book,' where I was ostensibly saving money, because as a regular employee I was 'getting paid.' That was of course all only because of that commission.
When the last transports left Terezin, there was suddenly a big labor shortage. Up to then the mandatory working age had been 15, but now they lowered this limit, so I also had to start working. Mainly in 1945, I did so-called 'ordonantz,' which was a messenger-boy between the ghetto leadership and its residents, or between the ghetto leadership and the German command. I used to be afraid, because I occasionally had to take some document or report to the SS headquarters. My hands would shake when I had to go among the SS-men. True, most of them were more indifferent than anything else, but there were also sadists, who used to for example drive around Terezin on a bike and beat people.
In Terezin there were also Jewish police, called the 'Ghettowache,' which was responsible for keeping order inside the ghetto. They were young guys in uniforms. Before the end of the war, the Germans sent them all into the gas, because they were afraid of the danger of some sort of rebellion or revolution from their ranks. Apparently our father's job protected us from transport for some time. But in the fall of 1944 the last transports left, and with them also my father and brother. That time nothing could save them anymore, at that time the ghetto leadership also left on the transports, and the rest of our family was likely saved by our mother, who peeled mica for the German war industry.
Luckily my mother later got somewhere else. Behind Terezin they'd built some wooden shacks, where they used to peel mica, which was material for the German war industry. Mica was used in the construction of airplanes. Likely our mother's work saved us, together with the work that our father ended up doing. Because transports were leaving Terezin ceaselessly. Apparently Father knew some people in the leadership, but I don't know anything else about it. Maybe thanks to that our father became a judge in Terezin. Because Terezin had a Jewish court, which took care of various offences that took place there. The Germans left the Jews a certain amount of self-government, even though more serious things were of course investigated by the Gestapo.
Occasionally I'd meet some other boy, but they all eventually left on the transports. I remember about three such friends, with whom I'd play soccer, always just two of us alone off somewhere, but basically I never got into any sort of larger collective. Only one time, when I used to go up to the attic, where some sculptor was secretly teaching children how to sculpt. He used to get food packages via Turkey, and gave it all to us. He also soon left on a transport.
Another experience of mine had to do with the fact that I was living among hundreds of women, and I was only eleven years old. There were still 'washrooms' there back from the army barracks days, which were basically troughs about ten meters long, with taps above them. They were huge washrooms, big enough for about a hundred people. Naked women of all possible age categories were washing or bathing there. They of course weren't embarrassed. I was an 11-year-old boy, and all around me were women - old, young, all together, it was a real shock for me.
We were wearing stars and had a few pieces of luggage with us. I remember that some people on the train were laughing at us. At the castle in Mlada Boleslav, they took our last few valuables and from there we left on a train, on which were only people being transported to Terezin.
Before we went into the transport, our father, who had his carpentry workshop, made all sorts of hiding places for money, like in shoe brushes, clothes brushes, or heels of shoes. First he'd take it apart, hide the money, and then glue it all back together again. He put German marks in there. Father even made a mezzanine in the house, this hiding place, where we hung Hungarian salami, he also hid some other food there and then also an old World War I pistol. After World War I our father had been a reserve officer of the Czechoslovak Army.
Various people hid some things for us. But the bravest was the poorest one - some clerk from the savings bank, whose wife worked for our father, who used to come to our place up to the last minute, even despite the fact that he could have lost his job. He used to come in a cap on which was written 'City Savings Bank.
Of all us children, the war must have been the hardest on our sister, because she was at that age when a person should get the most from that young lady's world, back then she was 16. It must have been truly horrible for her. On the other hand, for a long time friends kept coming to visit her. The Laufers' son used to also come to our place, they used to call him Osi [Oskar]. They used to meet at our place with some other non-Jewish young people, and together played ping-pong, volleyball, they had a gramophone and perhaps even danced together... Only one of them then became a collaborator. These friends were all from families that were less affluent than we were. For a long time they continued to be unafraid of visiting us.
We didn't get normal rations like other people. We didn't have milk, eggs, and meat, they gradually eliminated all our food coupons, so we received practically none.
As a child I didn't even mind so much that I wasn't allowed to go to school, I was only eight at the time, and took it from that kid's viewpoint. But I remember that the biggest scenes took place when Nanicka had to leave. She wanted to take me with her, and was offering Father that she'd hide me during the war, that she'd pretend I was her illegitimate child, that her whole family would help her, so that no one would find out about it. Father refused, saying that our family had to be together under all circumstances. At that time no one suspected what awaited us. I read somewhere that Dr. Laufer was considering emigration, but in the end stayed home. Only in that large Jewish factory, Melichar, there were Jews working in highly placed positions, who all emigrated in time.
I do remember, however, that we weren't allowed to leave Brandys. Then they also forbade us from going to the park, and even to go out into the street outside of certain hours. We had to hand in all sorts of things - jewels, radios, cameras, sports equipment, toys, bicycles, silverware, art and so on, they put a hold on all our money in the banks. Of course, the worst was that we had to give away the animals. We had a cat, dog and even a tame jackdaw, who luckily someone finally shot.
Right the next day after the arrival of the Germans, a notice came from the bar association that our father wasn't allowed to practice any longer. It may have been the Czech bar association, but its members basically wanted to take advantage of the situation and eliminate Jewish competition, both doctors and lawyers. I can't even imagine how horrible it must have been for my father.