Jiří Brady

“Once someone in our room stole food, which is something you don’t do, even though we were hungry. So we said, let’s try and catch him. I remember being active in that; we got some pills in the ambulance, I think they were called panflamin [ed. note: probably panflavin]. We put those in a bun and then left the bun on the table. The bun disappeared and then we went with everyone who had to take a pee. And we caught that boy. Then we set up a court and a jury and tried him. He confessed immediately and said: ‘I have no parents here and my brother is six or seven years old and he cries of hunger all the time, so that’s why I did it.’ We saw that nothing was black or white. And instead of sentencing him, we tried to help him and give him some of our own food.”

“My aunt, my mother’s sister, came [to Terezín] with her family and they went on to Auschwitz right away. It was called Birkenau at the time, or Březinka in Czech. When the Red Cross came to Terezín – that’s another story – there were worries that they would like to see Auschwitz too. So to show them that people survived there they set up a ‘family camp’ there. They did not select people to kill or to keep alive and instead they put them in a family camp for six months. Then, after the six months, they told the prisoners to write letters or cards to their friends or relatives with a later date – three months later – because the post was so slow. My aunt knew that my mother had died so she wrote ‘We will meet Greta tomorrow.’ Greta was my mother. When we got the card in Terezín it never occurred to us that she meant ‘I will be murdered tomorrow’ so we understood it like our mother was alive in Birkenau. When we got that card Hana wrote a card; someone had to pre-write it for her. She wrote: ‘Dear mother, I hope we will meet soon’ and so on. But since she wrote eight lines and we were only allowed to write six, the card came back to Terezín, and we still have the card. We thought our mother was alive and they were trying to tell us that our mother was dead too.”