Ing. Jaromír Lisý

“I could give you various details because, for example, one time at night they shoved a bloke into our cell in a broadcloth cloak. I was the cell leader, so I gave him the mattress next to my bed. He lied down there, and in the morning we found a pool of blood beside him. He’d slit his wrists with the glass from his glasses. Can you imagine cutting your wrists with that blunt glass?! Well, that’s how it was, I had to call in the guard. He immediately ordered the injured man to clean it up. He brought a bucket, a rag, and so on. Of course, we did it ourselves when [the guard] left. But the way it was that they were raiding one house after the other, and they found him in the skylight. He was a Jew, and people had been hiding him in the skylight, the housekeeper and his daughter would bring him food there. And they found him during one raid, so it was clear what would happen. But the interesting thing was that first they tended to him, they bandaged him up, they gave him some kind of pill every day because he’d got some inflammation of the veins. And when they cured him, they summoned him away.”

“Those were these kind of houses, each with separate rooms. One such room was for Czechs. My father was there, but they didn’t have any space at the time, so I was in another room, which was more for hardened criminals, so to say. One was a murderer who’d killed his woman. Another was a butcher who did illegal slaughters. There was a safe cracker. There was, well, a gay bloke, or how to say it. That was a criminal offence, you see, in Germany. So that’s the kind of company I found myself in, and I wondered how they’d behave toward me, a political prisoner and a young boy. They were completely fair... on the contrary, when there were air raids somewhere in Berlin, we didn’t hear it, but the door shook in its frame like this. And we knew bombs were falling. So we didn’t sleep, and we talked, and the chaps talked about their lives. That was also very interesting.”