"In the evening a man rang the doorbell and said he wanted to talk to me. I invited him into my study. He began by saying that he was at the Leipzig [Book] Fair, that he was from the West, and that he would be very interested in working with me. That they needed the characteristics of the individual professors of the technical university. I thought there was something wrong. I told him that I would not cooperate with any institutions, whether they were from East or West Germany. I threw him away. At that time my father was still alive, so I went to him to tell him what had happened. He advised me to go to the office and report the visit. I went there. There was also state security at every precinct town hall. When I told them and described the man, they winked. They knew him, he was one of them. He was a provocateur. The next morning they invited me again, this time to the university, where they had a special room in the rector's office. We talked, I told them the whole story again. Then they offered me to work with them after all. They were interested in me doing translations and so on. I replied that I wasn't suited for such things. We parted on good terms. From then on, and I know this from what I got to see of the documents, they took notice of me. Every year, at least once for fourteen days in a row, they watched me."
"That was probably the worst thing I've seen. Someone wasn't standing straight in front of me on the Appelplatz, or didn't have his hands down his pants, or I don't know why, but they pulled him out and beat him in front of us. It was an elderly man. I don't think he was standing at attention because he couldn't anymore and we couldn't have a stick or something like that. It was terrible for older people."
"They (parents) suffered terribly from the conditions, of course more than we children. During the transports we often suffered from hunger. A concrete example: on the way to Lodz they gave us a loaf of bread for eight people and that was it. And we were in some wagons for maybe three or four days, in which some animals had been transported before. The wagons were not even cleaned. It was a terrible situation. But when you're a child and your mother caresses you and gives you a piece of bread and she's starving... It was just very, very hard."
Sempfer Kosolofski was born in 1933 in Romania, where his parents‘ ancestors had moved from Germany. His parents owned a farm in Romania. In 1940, the father of the witness believed the Germans who were luring compatriots back to Germany as a result of the Second Vienna Arbitration. They promised to provide them with the same conditions they had in Romania. The large family therefore set off for Bavaria. But there they found that the Germans would not keep their promise and they spent two years in an immigration camp. Then the family was moved to a camp in Gmünd-Czech Velenice, where the father worked in the railway workshops. Suspecting that the family was Jewish, the Nazis deported them to the ghetto in Lodz, Poland. The witness experienced inhumane conditions in the camp. The suspicion of Jewish origin was not confirmed and the family was allowed to return to České Velenice. They escaped from the camp in 1944. They wanted to visit their relatives in Bavaria via Bohemia. They hid and lived on a farm in Horoměřice until the end of the war. After the war, the father officially worked there as a caretaker. They lost their Romanian citizenship and did not want to stay in Bohemia. In January 1949 they took advantage of the transport of Sudeten Germans from Liberec to Dresden. However, they never managed to cross over to the West. Sempfer Kosolofski studied Bohemian Studies in Berlin and Prague, and later worked at the Technical University in Dresden, where he lived in the suburbs.
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