Jiří Fišer

“We were transported in April 1942. On April 1, 1942 we left from Brno to the assembly place. We travelled to Terezín under the number Ah19 together with my brother, aunt, and uncles Emil, Bedřich and Richard. Uncle was assigned to the transport to Auschwitz. But they were young and strong and capable enough, and they had an opportunity, too, and they somehow managed to escape from the train car. Then they worked under a different identity for some gardener until the end of the war, and they changed their name Fischer to Novák. They remained there until the end of the war.”

“We children were put in a house for twins. I was there with my brother. The house looked a bit different than the family ones. Those had up to four levels of beds, the house for twins had two to three. Mengele intended to conduct pseudo-medical anthropological experiments on us. The higher-ranking officers had charged him with making scientific experiments that would show how much more soldiers could stand. Say, in the winter. There were twins there who were taken from a normal environment and cooled to minus twenty degrees [Celsius - trans.], and Mengele observed whether it was possible to survive that or not. When it was possible, he sent a letter to Berlin stating that the experiment had been successful.”

“When the train opened up on the ramp in Auschwitz, you could see that the other prisoners, who’d been there for some time, were throwing out those who hadn’t survived the journey. There were a lot of them. My impression is it was at least a third or a half who died on the way from Terezín to Auschwitz. We survived only because we were still children, so it kind of washed over us somehow.”

“They organised the death march long before the Russians came. They stood us in rows of three, a motley group. We only had a few Germans guarding us, kapos who weren’t afraid of being done in. So we set off in minus twenty, minus twenty-five degrees [Celsius - trans.]. We went in our prison rags, some had shoes, some didn’t. So we walked four kilometres from the family camp B2B to the main camp of Auschwitz. We children kept toward the front because we reckoned that if we went at the front, we’d be more likely to manage it. But the greatest tragedy was that the kapos went at the back, and we were terribly surprised that the war was practically over and we kept hearing gunshots. So we’d turn, look all around. The ones who couldn’t walk any more, the weak and the ill, those with no strength left, they stayed at the back. And before we reached the main camp, those who couldn’t go on, who tripped up or fell, they were shot, just like that.”

“We arrived to Auschwitz at night and we didn’t know where we were. When we saw the SS men who were doing the selection, we already knew that it was worse than Terezín. Josef Mengele was the head of the doctors in Auschwitz and he was selecting people who were interesting for him. He was an anthropologist and he was interested in people’s appearances, in handicapped people… I noticed, for example, that a transport arrived in another train and there was one man who had a prosthetic leg. Mengele was interested in this, and he thus immediately selected him so that the man would not be sent to the other group which was to be gassed. He studied how the man could live with the prosthesis, because he was interested in it. As for twins, he was interested in what we shared and how we differed.”