František Lederer

"In 1942, in September I would say, there was this 'lockdown' as they would call it. All those trucks came and they cleared out the whole Wolborska Street – as there were just immigrants living there, Slovaks, Hungarians, Czechs, all sorts of people. And we had to get into those trucks, we had to show our passports to those soldiers and they would take us to prison. In that prison we spent the whole night, and in the morning, at about five o'clock, as we didn't have a watch, so in the morning at about five o'clock, my brother and I - we had to go to an office to sign this document stating that we would stay in the ghetto, as we were important to the Germans. My brother was assigned to the screws and bolts factory and they assigned me to this factory where electronics had been manufactured. And since we had been working for the Germans and my father had been working in that office and my mother had been weaving carpets – which they didn't find important – they would hold them in that cell. We couldn't say goodbye to them because we didn't return to that cell from the office. After that, they would put us into this cell for people to be set free, as they called it, where they would hold us till the evening, then they would open the doors and say: 'Well, you may go home now,' – back to Wolborska. So we went home."

"And we were in that school for about four days before we had been assigned the apartment in Wolborska Street. And it was just this one room on the first floor. There were no toilets, the latrine was in the yard – we had to go down to the yard. A kitchen, a living room – this one room had to serve as all those things at the same time. And there were four of us. And my father, he was so upset that one day he would just get up and he would go to the wires – there were German troops guarding the area – as there were electric wires all around. And he wanted to hang himself on that wire. And my mother would run after him, saying: 'Please don't do this, Richard, you have children! You can stand this! We would persevere, as we had always done.' And she would drag him back and we just kept staring out of the window and we were asking God not to do this, so our father could come back to us. And in the end, he did come back."

“When I lived in the orphanage, we sometimes had to walk down the Stahuwna, where they brought a prisoner that was to be hanged by the Germans. He might have said as little as: ‘Why are you Germans doing this to us?’ and he was hanged. He was tied together and on the meadows was a gallows. The car of the undertaker was already there. And all the kids from the orphanage had to watch this grizzly show. It must have been terrible for the convict to see the undertaker’s car already standing there.”

“When we lived in Walborska street in the ghetto, my brother and me used to go shopping in a grocery store. Instead of potatoes, however, we had to buy potato peels. When we wanted to buy some saccharine, we had to buy it from the local Polish Jews who were selling it on the streets. They were speaking in the Jewish jargon. There was no butter, just margarine. Instead of honey, you had the ‘artificial honey’ or ‘Kunsthonig’, as it was called in German. It was a yellow brick that tasted somewhere between margarine and honey. We ate this with bread. The bread was Polish; it was a big loaf of black bread. This Polish bread was available.”

“As late as 1937 we were on holiday in Belgium and my dad insisted on coming back to Czechoslovakia even though he had a hunch that things are not going well for us Jews in Bohemia. But he had his factory here together with Glaser and he was very much attached to it, so we came back. If we had stayed in Belgium, we might have done the right thing. But we returned and that’s how it turned out.”

“There were about 60 of us in that cattle car, but we had only two buckets. The Nazis called the transport a ‘Fahrt ins Blaue’, a ‘journey into the blue’. Nobody told us where we were going. One morning, they woke us up by shouting ‘Schnell, schnell’ (quickly, quickly). We had to get out of the cattle car in a hurry. They called us ‘Hunde’ – ‘dogs’ and other names. They lined up women with their children. Depending on their age, the children either stood next to their mothers or they were held in their mother’s hands. The soldiers came from the entrance gate and started to take the children away from their mothers. It was a terrible moment. The children were pretty much all that was left to those women. They didn’t expect this – they thought that they would be allowed to stay together in the camp. They screamed in desperation, cried, some even fainted.”

“We took a bath and they cut our hair. We lined up in front of the commission and a German officer, a doctor, did the selection. Some people were sent to the left, some to the right. To the left, there stood about twenty people, to the right about eighty, maybe a hundred. I had already been selected to join the group of the weak ones that was going to end up in the gas chambers. We didn’t know where they were going… All of a sudden, the German officer called me back and asked me where I came from. I told him, that I was from Teplitz-Schönnau - Teplice-Šanov. He said: ‘But then we’re country-men. I’m from Žatec!’ I said: ‘Das ist aber ein Zufall’ – ‘What a coincidence’ in German. He told me to join the other group. This saved my life.”

„We were given spinach and ate it together with potato peels. My mom grinded it in a small milling machine. I don’t know if she brought it with her or found it in the ghetto in Lódź. We used it to grind spinach, potato peels, saccharine and saltbush. We made a kind of a pie from it. We would then have it in the morning together with substitute coffee.”