Robert Bardfeld

“One of my schoolmates was in the hospital with lung edema, and another one was also in the hospital because of his festered legs, and the remaining four were gradually leaving the work in the quarry as they were being transferred to other, worse worksites, and eventually I was the only one who stayed in the quarry. December was nearly there. I had no calories to keep going on [laughing], it was getting cold, and I thought: Christ, I will not survive the winter here. Alone in the quarry. And so I reported sick. And I really did feel awful. The male nurse in the hospital was German, and he took my temperature and reported that I had fever. I have the card from the hospital with me, they kept a register, and it is written there that I was admitted to the fourth room in the internal medicine ward.”

“Some groups - two to five young men - were released, but at the same time, they began sending those, who had been marked so before, to concentration camps. At first two seventh-graders were sent to Flossenbürg, that’s a place near Cheb but on the German side of the border. I have never been there. Their names were Vorlický and Zeman, and they went to Flossenbürg. They have survived the war, but they are no longer alive now. I and five of my schoolmates were sent to Buchenwald, and the rest, Kubík, for instance, were sent to Auschwitz. Unfortunately, there was this tragedy that one girl from the seventh grade was released, but after her return home she sent a letter to another girl – her friend and fellow prisoner – to Terezín, and they intercepted the letter. This girl, Sylva, was thus brought back to Terezín, and from there she was sent to Auschwitz, where she died a short time after.”

“The Americans were advancing from the west to the east in a crazy speed. But their supplies ran behind and therefore they stopped in Erfurt for one week, which was fifty kilometres from Buchenwald. During that week, the wardens evacuated nearly half of the camp and sent them on death marches. That was quite bad. But we voted on this in the hospital, or decided that we would not evacuate because we could not leave the poor bedridden prisoners. Only one of us asked to be included in that transport. He probably hoped that he would run away during the march. But all the others said that they would not go anywhere.”

“One day, he (Jöckl, the commander of Terezín – author’s note), when the warden Storch, who was one of the worst people there, informed him that we worked too little or too badly, ordered that we would be given no soup that day and that the group that worked there would be detained in a special cell. This was way too much even for the warden. Or he ordered the wardens to do make us ´exercise.´ That meant that they forced us to roll on the ground in the dirt and the wardens were jumping among us with heavy boots. They didn’t care if they stepped on you. They smashed somebody’s head or hand, for instance. After that we were supposed to go to that special cell, but Jöckl’s deputy let us go.”