Zuzana Justman

* 1931

  • "When it was really almost over, trains started coming from the east with people who were half dead, and there were a lot of dead people too. Petr and I used to go there to look for his brothers and his dad. We were forbidden by our mothers, but we went anyway. That was almost the end. Then we had sugar cubes, I don't remember where they came from, and we gave the sugar cubes to them - to those we recognized. There was also a young man I didn't recognize, he called out to me, 'Zuzana!' It was Miloš Glazer, and I gave him the sugar, and he was my first man after that."

  • "For example, we didn't walk down Vítkova Street in Karlín because there was a German school there and we were afraid of those German children. When I was a child and used to go to Želetava, I used to fight and I didn't let them get to me, but they explained to me that if a German child attacked me, I couldn't fight back. So we made sure not to go down that street, but one day a friend and I were coming back from the shelter and a German girl, who was about twice my size, started beating us. I managed to escape, but my girlfriend didn't. After that I often had a headache because I felt guilty for leaving my girlfriend behind. No one had to explain to us that we should be afraid. We were afraid because the Germans were everywhere. Then we heard all these stories, but of course we didn't know about Auschwitz."

  • "When the Nazis closed the Jewish school, the Jewish community organized these shelters. There were three or four shelters in Prague, and I went to Soukenická Street. Officially, we just played, but very interesting people came to teach us. For example, Erich Saudek, the best translator of Shakespeare, read his translations for us and gave us lectures. Then when I went to the American high school in Buenos Aires, I knew a lot more about Shakespeare than the American kids."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    New York, 10.01.2024

    (audio)
    délka: 01:25:31
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    New York, 26.01.2024

    (audio)
    délka: 01:21:17
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
  • 3

    New York, 08.02.2024

    (audio)
    délka: 01:38:35
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
  • 4

    New York, 19.03.2024

    (audio)
    délka: 01:40:03
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

She gave sugar cubes to prisoners returning to Terezín from other camps at the end of the war.

Zuzana Justman before the war
Zuzana Justman before the war
zdroj: Witness's archive

Zuzana Justman was born Zuzana Picková in Prague on 20 June 1931. During the Nazi occupation during the Second World War, the family gradually lost all their property, including the Pick Brothers factory, and their civil rights. The Pick family was to be deported to Terezín in 1943. Brother Robert Pick, later a satirist, fell ill with polio in Terezín. The Nazis took the witness‘s father Viktor Pick to Auschwitz where, according to witnesses, he perished in a gas chamber immediately upon arrival. Zuzana, her mother, brother and grandmother survived the war in the Terezín ghetto and returned to their apartment in Karlín. In 1948, the family emigrated to South America with the help of an uncle, except for her brother who had joined the Communist Party. Zuzana finished high school in the US and then entered university. She settled in New York. She has made several documentaries on the Holocaust and has also worked on other socio-historical topics. She won a prestigious television Emmy Award in the USA for her documentary Voices of the Children based on interviews with the survivors of imprisonment in Terezín and Auschwitz. After November 1989, she was active in raising funds for restoring Jewish sights in Czechoslovakia. In 2024, Zuzana Justman was living in New York in an apartment overlooking Central Park.