Jiří Brady

“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.”

“Why did I do it? When we walked to work in our prisoner uniforms every day in Gleiwitz [ed. note: an auxiliary camp for the Auschwitz concentration camp], I was sixteen and people must have known that I was no murderer or such, yet they turned away instead of helping the least bit. So I said to myself that should I survive I would be different – I would try to help everyone I can. Then I had a problem dealing with it all when I came back home. I thought I had to honour my parents somehow because they had given me good upbringing. It took me a year to find out. The best thing that I could do for them would be living a good life.”