Miloš Čulík

“The people were mostly intelligentsia. We used to talk to them and we were curious about their lives. They had also nothing to say. They knew what it looked like. There was a father with his son, different writers, so we talked to them. And because we couldn't go out we unscrewed the light bulb so that it was dark in there. And when they left we screwed it back. Our cells were completely at the end and you couldn't see absolutely anything in there. Then we were meeting those people... And I've got the feeling we came across Horáková but I'm not sure about it. Women were in their own camp, they were completely off. I met Feierabend, a brother of the Minister of Finance in London. I used to wash up the cups with him. He knew three languages and he was very smart. When we switched the lights off, some of them talked about their own books. Those were such sophisticated discussions. But we were so exhausted that we couldn't listen to it.”

“Roiko and Schmidt were people whom we never knew what to think about. On the one hand, he beat someone to death or something bad happened. On the other hand, he helped someone. So we had no idea what was going on in their minds.” “Have you got any personal experience?” “I had a personal experience. We stopped working on a building site and they let us starving for three days. We were ravenous after those three days. I was on the women's courtyard begging for a piece of bread. They gave it to me and I fainted. Roiko stepped over me and went on. He didn't notice me at all. He had a wife there and she was said to be quite nice. We didn't care about it. We tried to get out to a storming-party so that we had an approach to food. To be starving was a horrible thing. We were unloading goods in Schichta Factory. We were unloading forage cake and we already knew which was good and which wasn't good. Then we were unloading for example poppy seeds. So we ate poppy seeds for even two days. We used to do it like this because when you got bread in the morning and soup in the evening, then you didn't know what to do.”

“Dvořák was one of our students. They used to say about him that they had a party in the meeting and he was among them. Nobody knew what he said. He had a brilliant memory. He remembered anything but he lacked intelligence. When he was tired and couldn't work any more, he stayed lying. I came to see him in an hour or two and he was lying exactly the same way we let him. He had his hand in bandage and he didn't make a move within the two hours. Then I saw him for the last time when I went to the bathroom. He had his hand in bandage, you could practically see through the palm of his hand. Nobody took care of him. Then he was moved to a single room. It was a cell where you were stripped off your clothes and you defecated in the corner. Then he was transported to another concentration camp and I never heard of him ever since. They said that Sylva Rajtrová used to take the sketches out. They found it with her and she was sent to liquidation. It was the danger lurking all around us. We were guarded even outside, we couldn't even move. They were waiting for their every single chance.”

“My name is Miloš Čulík, I was born in Očová in Slovakia on November 23rd, 1924. My father was a police officer, he got a post in Slovakia. He was an Italian legionnaire. Later he divorced my mother and I left for Roudnice nad Labem at my Granddad's to be brought up. I carried on living there. I got trained as an auto-mechanic. After a year they opened the Secondary School of Engineering so I went there. As for the next steps in my life, you are formed the way you have been brought up. I grew up with the Sokol and Scout movement in Masaryk's Republic times, I knew nothing else. So I went to school with an idealistic belief. After Heydrich's reign, which we all experienced as seventeen-year-old boys, we thought that the situation was very bad for the Czech nation. But we could not imagine what way they were going to solve it. On Saturday June 24th, 1942 there came two buses. We were staring at them from the windows and we were wondering what they were doing there. Eventually they came indoors, they wrote all the documents and we were transported to Malá pevnost in Terezín. There was no student (demonstration – author's note). They used to commonly grumble at the local conditions under the German reign there, at the situation and repressions that emerged before Heydrich times. It was common.”