"I woke up, called Valina and told her, 'I think I got fever - I must be hallucinating, there is a Czechoslovak flag across the street.' - 'You're not hallucinating, that's a revolution. You're fine now, we faked it to prolong your stay. Look, here's your white coat.' It was already warm, so I just threw on my white coat. 'Let's go to the Old Town Square to pick up corpses.' I was staring like a fool because I had slept through it all. There was shooting, and since we were the nearest hospital, the wounded and the dead were being taken to the basement, and there were lots of dead and wounded there. They brought in a Russian soldier who was shooting at the ceiling. He was a bit of a nutter, they were all kind of wild, so the nurses and the doctor had to strap him to the bed and take his revolver. Everybody was scared to go into that room. It was always men who carried the stretchers but they always wanted me, because I was hardened from the concentration camp, to reach into their jacket pockets, even if they were maybe bloody, and get their papers. That's how we got the identity of these people."
"Then we went with this gentleman, his name was Knobloch, he was a planter from Bukovno. He led us along a road, he said it was a guerrilla trail, in the woods somewhere near Bezděz. He was leading a bicycle with a radio strapped to it, which he was taking somewhere for a repair. He kept going in that direction, towards Mladá Boleslav, I don't know how far it was, but we got there on foot. He took us home, let us sleep overnight, and the next day he said, 'Girls, I'll give you money for the train, but you have to obey the train gang boss because he would be in danger if something happened. He will hide you and take you all the way to Prague.' We rode all the way to Prague to the former Denis station; it's gone now. We got there and we didn't know what to do. The train dumped us there and we had nothing to do but go to the bridge and cry when we saw Prague Castle. I don't know how we moved on."
"When we arrived at the platform, we were thrown out, the Germans shouted 'Aus, aus', they chased us. I met Karl Ehrmann there, who had been in Terezín, and he said, 'Hey, this is where you're going up the chimney.' Then they lined us up, the old people were taken out, the young people went somewhere else, they had to go to some work. I don't remember going to work there; we just stood on the Appelplatz. They ran us out and assigned us to different barracks, I was in number twenty-five, and because I like seven, I was like, 'Thank God, I'm in a seven,' and that's how it was with my tattoo number. I got 4971, which is divisible by seven, which is good. I believed in that."
"There were people older than me in the car I was in. I didn't have many friends there. Of course we rode in cattle cars, as usual, about fifty of us. There were these barrels where you could go to defecate, and it was terrible. There were only little windows, it was hot, it stank... We would lie down, but when we wanted to lie down, we would lie over each other. The trip to Auschwitz took a few days. I know I could see Ostrava from that little window, so we must have gone via Ostrava."
"Terezín was a normal ghetto. You couldn't walk out, you had to do what they told you to, but I can say that people who were in Terezín talk about what they experienced, but compared to camps like Auschwitz and other concentration camps, Terezín was a convalescent home."
Eva Balíková, née Beständigová, was born in Prague on 7 March 1925 into a Jewish family. Her father was a merchant, her mother a housewife, and the family was completely assimilated in the Czech environment. Eva attended a grammar school, from which she was expelled because of her Jewish origins, and then was a sewing apprentice. In an attempt to delay deportation, she married Vilém Lederer who came from a mixed family at the age of 16. Still, she did not escape deportation and she and her parents were deported to the Terezín ghetto on 2 July 1942. She worked in the labour organisation department. After two months in Terezín, her parents were transported to Auschwitz where they perished. Eva was deported to Auschwitz on 18 May 1944. In the autumn of 1944, she was selected to work in the Christianstadt camp (now Krzystkowice in Polish territory), a branch of the Gross-Rosen camp. She worked in an ammunition factory. The camp was evacuated in January 1945, Eva managed to escape from the death march and reached Prague in late January 1945. She hid with various people but was arrested on a tip-off while trying to obtain false documents. During her detention she fell ill and remained in the hospital in Dušní Street until the end of the war. She was left alone after the liberation, as her had parents perished in Auschwitz and her husband died of typhus in Terezín. She worked office jobs, got married later on and brought up a daughter. Eva Balíková died on 19 November 2021.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
