Libuše Hittmanová

“As I was going by train, suddenly you could see train cars standing in railway stations, with people in them – from the concentration camps. They crammed them into the cars so that you could see only their heads. Now they didn’t know what to do with them. In Stod there is a large grove, a park, where they shot them all in order to get rid of them.”

“There [in Zbůch – ed.’s note] was a camp similar to the one in Nuremberg which housed the captured Russians who had to work in the mine. They wore striped rags, even in winter, wooden clogs, and their life there was miserable. Then a donation campaign was declared, aimed especially at young people – nobody had anything, basically, but people gave us what they could and we carried it there to help the prisoners a little bit: some medicines, food, and clothes. Of course, I and my sister went there too. But my body was so terribly weak that I contracted some infection there. In a few days, I ran high fever of 42°C, herpes, and I was at the point of dying. My parents were desperate, and so was my sister. The German doctor had been killed, as had been all the Germans, allegedly there had been a massacre in the village. I didn’t even want to know about it. Now there was no doctor. My sister thus walked up to the Americans to ask if there was some doctor there, because I was so terribly sick. They recommended her to go to the monastery in Chotěšov, where the main garrison was. She rode a bike to Chotěšov and she really managed to communicate with them. We all knew some German, because we had to learn German at that time. Thus she told them what she needed and a doctor came there, an older man around forty, who could speak German, and another younger doctor. They came there and when she told them everything about my state, they grabbed her bike, made her get into a jeep with them and they loaded the bike in it, and they arrived to us. When they saw how bad I was, they gave me some pills and said. ´Give it to here every four hours – during the day, at night, during the day, at night.´ Now I know that this was the first penicillin I have received in my life. At that time nobody knew about penicillin yet. In two weeks, my health was slowly improving and I was getting better.”